Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem's Animation Style Finally Lets The Characters Shine As Individuals
This post contains spoilers for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem."
From its inception, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" was a malleable franchise, one that has never stopped being reinvented. After being introduced in a dark and gritty comic book, an homage and parody of superhero comics of the time, the Turtles became toys and their design and story changed. The same would happen once the Turtles made the jump to animation in the '80s, with a cartoon that introduced new characters, new personalities, backstories, and more. Since then, each new iteration of the "TMNT" has changed things, like when Shredder became an alien, or the first time Splinter went from being a pet rat to a human turned into a rat.
As much as things change, some things stay the same, like the relationship between the Turtles and Splinter or the look of the Turtles. They've always sort of looked the same, the only things telling them apart being their different weapons, their color-coded bandanas, and the belts with their initials on them.
That is not the case with "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem." This is a film that reinvents the whole "TMNT" franchise, turning enemies into friends and changing the backstories of many characters. Some of the bigger changes involve reimagining Splinter's background in martial arts, and doing more to highlight the teenage part of the Turtles by casting actual kids in the main roles and letting them riff on one another. The film also employs a stunning visual style that feels like teenage sketches, as if the Turtles themselves were animating the film, which makes the characters shine as individuals. This last bit is important, because of how rare it is for the franchise.
Heroes in a half shell
In "Mutant Mayhem," there is no mixing up the Turtles, no mistaking which one is which. This is in big part thanks to the character animation team and the voice casting making each Turtle an entirely unique individual with a strong personality — like Ralph's anger issues and Donnie's more reserved and shy demeanor.
But it is the character designs that make the characters stand out. Ralph is not just the bad boy of the group, he is the biggest of the Turtles, a buffier dude with physical prowess that probably doesn't help his anger management. Meanwhile, Mikey is very scrawny and has braces (don't ask how they put those in). The Turtles' personalities inform their looks, which in turn informs how they behave. Though we have had Turtles with individual personalities for decades, the designs here make them even more unique and like true individuals rather than slightly different variations of one another.
Indeed, the look of "Mutant Mayhem" is unlike what we've seen in previous versions of "TMNT." Director Jeff Rowe has described the style of the film as if it was concept work, saying they wanted the style to look "sketchy and imperfect and misshapen and reminiscent of the way you draw when you're a child or a teenager." Most characters look asymmetrical, rough, more like actual mutants in the case of Superfly's gang, who are both a bit off-putting and also goofy. We also see that in the Turtles themselves, who are still growing teenagers.
Not the first time this happened
The thing is, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" didn't invent giving the Turtles unique and distinct looks. As mentioned above, these characters and this franchise have evolved with each new portrayal and each new medium. We only got the different bandanas when the Turtles became action figures. And we got different looks for each Turtle in the popular 2018 Nickelodeon show, "Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."
This was, like "Mutant Mayhem," a reimagining of the franchise that was set in the Turtles' early teens when they had just started their careers as heroes. The show gave Splinter a brand new backstory as a former ninja master and movie star, and introduced supernatural elements like Shredder as a demon. Indeed, in the show the Turtles have anime-like powers learned from mystic ninja techniques (kind of like in "Naruto") such as super speed, super strength, being able to transform objects into weapons, and even the ability to summon spirits of past ninjas.
And the show also gave each Turtle a distinct look, making Raph a big and bulky guy, making Mikey the shortest of the brothers, and Donnie a tall and slender warrior. It was inventive, and it made that show feel fresh and bold, which "Mutant Mayhem" is now taking to the next level.