Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Creative Team Explains Unique Animation Style

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are returning to the big screen this summer with a brand new movie that aims to get the beloved heroes back to their teenaged roots. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is an animated adventure that depicts the titular characters more like teenagers than we’ve seen in recent movies, and the animation style itself is meant to be a direct reflection of that.

Mutant Mayhem writer-director Jeff Rowe recently spoke to Variety about the animation in the movie, which resembles the groundbreaking style of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Mitchells vs. the Machines, but still has its own flair. According to Rowe, it was about capturing the teenage spirit, and making the art resemble the drawings and doodles of teenagers.

“I think for us, artistically, it was a reaction to a 30-year trend in 3D CG animation to push towards photorealism and hyper-realistic lighting and texturing,”said Rowe “Then, a few years ago, Into the Spider-Verse happened, and that showed that a movie can look like the concept artwork and can be critically and financially successful. That opened a lot of doors and I think we tried to take that football and run with it on Mitchells, and then on Turtles, I tried to be even less compromising. We decided we wanted this movie to look exactly like a concept artwork, and we want the concept artwork to feel distinctly human and not computer-generated. And that means sketchy and imperfect and misshapen and reminiscent of the way you draw when you’re a child or a teenager, and your passion and enthusiasm for making art hasn’t been dimmed by formal art training. 

“It’s the kind of drawing you do before you have that voice in your head that says, ‘Don’t do that. That’s not how you draw.’ We wanted to design a film that had that level of unfettered expression. And then it was just a lot of designing it and convincing a lot of really talented artists that it was OK to make mistakes, and that those were actually features not bugs.”

Putting the Teen in TMNT

Production designer Yashar Kassai went on to add that it was difficult to teach the artists on the team to draw like teenagers. After years of training, it was almost like a step backward, but one that was necessary to nailing the TMNT style.

“The thing that felt so wrong in the beginning was telling my very highly trained, skillful artists who are also ultra-talented that, because we’re drawing like teenagers, I need you to draw that again but I need you to peel away all those years you spent in art school learning your craft and draw like your 15-year-old self,” says Kassai. “But once everyone relinquished the conventional design wisdom of animation, we had a lot of fun.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Rating

The last two live-action TMNT movies to hit theaters — 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows — received PG-13 ratings. This time around, Mutant Mayhem returns the franchise to its roots with a PG rating.

According to the MPA, Mutant Mayhem has been rated PG for “sequences of violence and action, language and impolite material.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem arrives in theaters on August 4th.