Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Clip Reveals the Baby Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem has released a new clip, which features the baby versions of the turtles – who are too cute not to check out in advance. Watch the new clip from the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, below, as this is the only sort of content the movie is likely to release during Comic-Con week. 

This new clip from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a rapid-fire flashback montage, in which Splinter (Jackie Chan) recounts the Turtles’ origin story to the group of mutated teenagers. Of course, by now the TMNT origin story is an iconic piece of lore that any kid born since the 1990s knows; that makes the clip a perfect showcase of the winking and irreverent way that director Jeff Rowe (The Mitchells vs. the Machines) and Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen, and their co-writers are approaching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. 

The film will clearly use public knowledge of TMNT to both acknowledge the franchise’s extensive (and at this point, winding) history, while simultaneously subverting our expectations of how that history gets referenced or explored. It’s giving a lot of longtime Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fans and casual moviegoers alike hope and/or interest that Mutant Mayhem will be a to TMNT what Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was to the Spider-Man franchise. That is to say: an unexpected dark-horse release that ends up being a massive rebooting of the entire franchise.

Comparisons between Mutant Mayhem and Into the Spider-Verse have been made since fans first got a look at the former. The animation style that Mutant Mayhem is using is very much in the vein of the “living comic book” style of the Spider-Verse movies. 

“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,”Jeff Rowe explained to Variety “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.”

That quote about the goal of making the “artwork to feel distinctly human and not computer-generated” is a winner for a lot of fans right now, as the controversy over AI-generated content in Hollywood is driving the WGA/SAG Strike. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem arrives in theaters on August 4th. According to the MPA, Mutant Mayhem has been rated PG for “sequences of violence and action, language and impolite material.”