There's always a mad rush to translate comic book and TV cartoon characters into live-action movies. It's not like adaptations of these properties using flesh-and-blood people are cursed, far from it. However, there's a stigma towards animation as a medium in this belief that a "proper" theatrical movie translating beloved pop culture icons can only be a street that leads from animation or drawings to the "real world". Why not just translate them into a new art style when bringing these figures into the world of animated cinema? After all, many characters belong in animation for a very good reason! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a great example of this, providing so much energy and life to the titular superheroes by keeping them in the world of animation, Reality would be too much of an anchor for these young heroes, as seen by the 2014 and 2016 Ninja Turtles movies. They need the limitless possibilities of animation to thrive.
Mutant Mayhem begins with those beloved turtles Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu), Raphael (Brady Noon), Donatello (Micah Abbey), and Michaelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.) living underground with their adopted rat dad Splinter (Jackie Chan) in fear of humans. After all, they're different from "normal" society and Splinter is convinced humans will only want to kill and milk the Turtles. However, being rambunctious teenagers, the turtles are eager to disobey their father and interact with the larger world. Thanks to new human pal April O'Neil (Ayo Edebiri), the quartet gets a crazy idea: they can stop the dastardly New York criminal Superfly (Ice Cube) and garner the love of humanity that way. Once people see the turtles are heroes, not monsters, they'll have to accept these teenagers! This problem gets a touch complicated, though, when Superfly is revealed to be a mutant animal like the turtles. Where will the loyalties of these critters eventually lie?
I feel sorry for the directors of some of this year's biggest live-action blockbusters like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Flash, or Fast X. It must be so frustrating to spend the GDP of the Marshall Islands on a movie and then the action sequences just come out looking like garbage. Worse, the action scenes in costly titles like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny are being put to shame by the action-heavy set pieces in modern animated features ostensibly aimed at children. The likes of The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and now Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem are doing circles around these PG-13 tentpoles. Unbound by the burden of "realistic" CG or choppy editing, Mutant Mayhem delivers all the wacky chaos you'd want out of a Ninja Turtles movie.
When these reptiles get to fighting, Mutant Mayhem director Jeff Rowe proves adept at keeping things zippy and energetic but not devolving into incoherent chaos. A lengthy sequence where the siblings confront a bevy of mob bosses around New York City, much of it captured in a single take, is especially impressive. These characters engage in fight scenes that take advantage of the stylized opportunities of animation, yet also find time to inject tangible touches of reality into the proceedings (like Splinter reaching for any nearby objects on the floor to use in a skirmish) that keeps things dramatically involving. Speaking of fun set pieces, a big appropriately goofy finale takes the ridiculousness of this franchise's "mutant ooze" element to dizzying new heights. Impressively, the scope of Mutant Mayhem gets expanded greatly here without sacrificing the emotionally involving elements. Best of all, it's just a flat-out ridiculous way to end a movie and that feels right for these characters. We're a long way from the self-consciousness of the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, which felt it needed to ground everything about these characters in gritty reality. Anything about turtles who use ninja skills to fight bad guys should have the silliness dialed all the way up, like Mutant Mayhem's best fight scenes.
If there is any critical shortcoming in a screenplay attributed to Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, Jeff Rowe, and Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit, it's that Mutant Mayhem can find itself relying too heavily on didactic expository dialogue. An opening scene with Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito) flat-out turning to the camera to discuss the incoming feature's core themes of "family" establishes a precedent for the rest of the film to dip its toes into overly obvious lines. Lots of elements in this Ninja Turtles movie exude confidence out of the wazoo. This kind of dialogue does not and feels outright at odds with the visual-oriented impulses of the productions. While the images of Mutant Mayhem are often so vivid, its characters still feel the need to hammer home fairly obvious character beats, backstory details, or thematic parallels.
There are also certain background characters in Mutant Mayhem, namely this film's incarnation of Bebop & Rocksteady, that totally could've just been played by professional voice actors rather than recognizable comedians/actors. Thankfully, most of the cast does great work with the roles they've been assigned, particularly all four of the leads playing the turtles. Even in voice-over form, they have great chemistry with one another and clearly communicate discernible personalities for each reptile. Ayo Edibiri also makes for an incredibly entertaining iteration of April O'Neil while Ice Cube emerges as the voice-over MVP with his bravura work as Superfly. Cube is just bursting with personality as this unabashedly wicked baddie and he lends lots of energy to this particular character.
All of those vocals are filtered through an animation style that emphasizes a raggedy, scraggly quality to the world of the Ninja Turtles. Obvious scribble lines are plastered on everything from puffs of smoke to the moon, towering skyscrapers in New York City are crooked rather than straight, while the world evokes a more hand-drawn animation aesthetic than the perfectionism of typical CGI. Granted, it does take a while to get used to the fact that most of the human beings (April O'Neil excepted) are ugly as sin, but once you adjust to that quality, the animation style of Mutant Mayhem is truly impressive. Rather than being derivative of other modern CG features rooted in older animation styles like The Mitchells vs. The Machines or the Spider-Verse titles (the former of which was co-directed by Rowe), Mutant Mayhem uses those projects as launchpads for a wholly new aesthetic.
It's now been well over three decades since the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first made their way to the big screen in 1990. The characters have been a staple of both pop culture and multiplexes ever since, but they've never felt as alive and vibrant as they do within Mutant Mayhem. Even after seeing them in so many other features before, the best parts of this new computer-animated title make it feel like viewers are meeting the Turtles for the very first time. Rarely has their adolescent angst felt so real or their world been so visually compelling. Also, no other Turtles movie has previously featured the chillaxed Mondo Gecko (Paul Rudd) before! Though it has some cracks in its shell, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a lot of fun and a great encapsulation of why certain animated characters should remain in animation.
No comments:
Post a Comment