When director Jeff Rowe (co-director of “The Mitchells vs. the Machines”) and producer Seth Rogen (“Sausage Party”) first talked about making their animated “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” edgier and scarier than the rest of the beloved franchise, they both seized on “Jurassic Park” as a touchstone.
“One of my favorite movies as a kid was ‘Jurassic Park,’ and I saw that when I was seven in a theater because I love dinosaurs,” Rowe told IndieWire. “And the opening of that film is terrifying — it scared the shit out of me. I was crying and immediately wanted to leave the theater, but I stayed through it all. It successfully established the Raptors as one of the coolest villains ever, and it established a world where bad things could happen.
“Seth had a similar experience and he said a great thing: ‘Jurassic Park’ is like a monster movie for kids. And it was like, wow, that’s cool. And it kind of gave us permission as filmmakers.”
This resulted in the gritty, intense opening, where a high-tech firm’s strike force hunts down rogue scientist Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito), who has created his own mutant animal family, starting with a housefly. The frantic, hand-held camera literally makes us a fly on the wall during the explosive action, which ends with the scientist’s mutagen falling into the sewers of New York City, where the turtles are born along with several other creatures.
“There’s not a joke in the first five minutes of the film,” Rowe continued. “We wanted to give the movie real stakes and feel like we’re living in a world with consequences, because then when you meet these affable, happy-go-lucky teenage turtles, it’s gonna be a lot more interesting to see them collide with the antagonistic forces.”
Taking inspiration from the 2D-like “Spider-Verse” and “The Mitchells,” Rowe infused this punk origin story with his own vision of a chaotic, hand-drawn aesthetic. It’s like sketches he drew as a teen, only drenched in oil paint, as the turtles try to save New York from angry mutants (led by Ice Cube’s hip-hop Superfly baddie).
“I grabbed the throttle and just pushed it to 11,” Rowe added. “We wanted the art style to speak to what it felt like to be a teenager, which is not polished, it’s not refined — it’s messy but it’s passionate, like the turtles. What would it be like if they drew themselves and their world?”
Which made sense as part of a strategy to stress the average teen in Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael, voiced by teens Nicolas Cantu, Shamon Brown Jr., Micah Abbey, and Brady Noon, respectively. But it was a negotiation with Nickelodeon and Paramount about how much they could slim the turtles down. Rowe and Rogen didn’t want them bulky, as they’d previously been portrayed, so they settled on slightly muscular.
The animation was principally done at Mikros Animation in Montreal and Paris (with support from Cinesite in Vancouver). But the hand-drawn look was more “Arcane” or “Entergalactic” than “Spider-Verse” or “The Mitchells,” with actual 2D pencil work for spikes or other exaggerated effects.
“It’s almost like toon shading where there’s stepped layers with some kind of breakup that’s reminiscent of an illustrated technique,” he said. “And the breakup between areas of light and shadow should look like crosshatching. They had to build lines onto the characters that extend off of them that stick out in space to break the silhouette. That was a big thing, figuring out how to have light break up across the surface.”
From the beginning, though, the messy character drawings were difficult to model in 3D because they kept breaking up when you rotated them. Then they realized, so what? The imperfection looks great. “That became the style,” Rowe said. “Those mistakes became happy accidents. They were features, not bugs, and we just started embracing things looking weird from different angles.”
For the color palette, Rowe wanted very saturated colors and referenced Wong Kar Wai’s “Chunking Express,” Seijun Suzuki’s “Tokyo Drifter,” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” and “Pierrot le Fou.” “They’re so specific,” he said of Godard. “And sometimes they just use primary colors, and sometimes everything is red, and sometimes they use everything. And that’s really cool. And there’s this street photographer, Alex Webb, who takes these photos that just kind of carve up the frame with these big blocks of hyper-saturated colors, but they’re always found lighting, never studio lighting.
“And we made the animation askew by picking two or three colors per scene and to be saturated with, and like absolutely dark in the blacks, which you’re told not to do in animation. How many different colors can we make green turtles by changing the colors of the lights?”
The camera work, meanwhile, was a combination of cinéma vérité for the turtles’ POV and more of a formal balance for the adults’ perspective. “We looked at [Emmanuel ‘Chivo’] Lubezki a lot, like ‘Y tu mamá también,’ and Spike Jonze, like his expanded Arcade Fire music video, ‘Scenes from the Suburbs,’ added Rowe. “Just all these wonderful natural light kind of Steadicam, handheld shots of teenagers hanging out, feeling fun, and easygoing. And then when we get into the adult world, where it’s scary and stuffy, we went for technically precise, smoother movement, with cameras on cranes.”
But there were also references to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” including a straight-up montage, “where it’s about a bunch of lost souls coming together and finding each other,” Rowe said. “And there’s a nod to the [opening] long oner, where we’re in a bowling alley interacting with all of the different characters and seeing the turtles make friends with the mutants.”
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” is now playing in theaters.
