TMNT: Mutant Mayhem Has One Major Thing In Common With Spider-Verse
Heavy spoilers for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" to follow.
"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" was a miracle of filmmaking, a movie that shouldn't work — it has too many characters, drastically different visual styles throughout, and a story that is simultaneously too kid-friendly for adults yet too adult for the demographic normally associated with American animation. Yet not only did work, but the film became a smash hit (joining our list of the best movies of all time). More importantly, it proved that animated movies could look like stylized concept art and still find an audience, a big one at that. Since then, we've seen many other movies experiment with their own unique visual styles and with stories that are bolder and more mature than, say, "Minions" or "The Boss Baby."
The latest movie to join this new era of animated movies is "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," a movie that reinvents the popular franchise for a new generation with eclectic influences like recent anime blockbusters, and a bold visual style that's unlike anything we've seen in most animated movies.
While the inventive and highly stylized look is something "Mutant Mayhem" shares with "Spider-Verse," it also has something else in common with the latest Spider-Man movie, "Across the Spider-Verse." Both hyper-stylized movies bring live-action material into their animated worlds.
Bueller? Bueller?
Earlier this year, "Across the Spider-Verse" did something very unexpected and brought characters from live-action into the animated universe of the film, like showing flashbacks to both the Sam Raimi and Marc Webb franchises with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. While we'd seen this in films like "Wall-E," where an animated character is seeing a live-action film, "Across the Spider-Verse" went further by having The Spot interact with the live-action world of "Venom" and having Donald Glover appear as a live-action version of Prowler.
This is not just a very cool easter egg for fans, but also a fantastic detail that tells us something about the film itself — it is canonically animated. Considering how many different universes we see in "Across the Spider-Verse," the fact that some were live-action and some weren't indicates that Miles is canonically animated; his universe is animated, while Donald Glover's isn't.
Something similar happens in "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem." Early in the film, we see the turtles, who long to join the human world, sneak into an open-air screening of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," and we see clips from the live-action film rather than an animated version in the "Mutant Mayhem" visual style. Later on, Splinter throws a surprise party for the kids and gets cardboard cut-outs of live-action versions of Chris Pine, Chris Pratt and Chris Evans, suggesting they become the turtles' imaginary human friends. Even the videos that Splinter uses to train the turtles in martial arts are from the real world.
I wanna be where the people are
Like with "Across the Spider-Verse," the use of live-action tells us something about the Turtles and the world they inhabit. A big part of the film is their longing for acceptance by humans and their fascination with them, so by using live-action to represent pop culture from the human world, "Mutant Mayhem" further separates the turtles from what they consider to be the real world. the world of humans they aren't allowed to be part of.
That is why the choice of "Ferris Bueller" as the film the turtles watch is brilliant, because it is an archetypical American high school movie, an experience the Turtles think they want but do not understand. They start joking about whether high schools really are as portrayed on the film, so by the time the film ends and they join a school, we are left wondering if they'll try to steal a car on a school day.
Of course, other movies have mixed animation with live-action and treated both as different worlds, like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," and "Space Jam," but the idea of two movies doing this in the same year, after the format became so rare in the years since those two films, is rather cool and exciting.