SMELLS LIKE TEEN MUTANT SPIRIT

Mutant Mayhem siphons its DNA from Rogen and creative partner Goldberg’s shared experience in teen comedies like Superbad, which Rogen began writing at 13. The two even met as teens; their production company Point Grey is named in honor of their Vancouver high school.

“What’s funny for me and Evan, [writing] was born out of not seeing a lot of movies that we felt represented our high-school experience,” Rogen says. “That was the motivation for Superbad. Then I started Freaks and Geeks. It was a weird convergence, speaking to a lot of themes I thought were unexplored in the teen genre.”

Now after making influential comedy hits and boundarypushing adaptations of comic books like Preacher, Invincible, and The Boys, Rogen and Goldberg are all-in on Ninja Turtles. Given their background, Rogen felt uniquely qualified to give the Turtles their overdue teen movie. “It’s a genre that was formative to me, creatively,” he says. “This idea of making a Ninja Turtles movie that was focusing on the fact they’re teenagers who want to be accepted and have normal lives; it played so organically into many teenage themes.”

Director Rowe cites influences in Freaks and Geeks, Lady Bird, The Edge of Seventeen, and Pen15 (minor spoilers but a titan of the genre, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, also gets a nod in the movie). “Being a teenager is one of the most difficult times in a human’s life,” says

Rowe. “Your body changes, all these differences in your chemistry that lead you to have insane feelings. You’re passionate; you’re afraid, angsty, and nervous. You feel the most alone as a teenager.” He adds the best teen movies “engage with the preposterous drama and seriousness” of those years.

Acceptance is a keyword for Mutant Mayhem. Drawing parallels between the Turtles’ isolation from the world and any teenager’s wish to fit in, the movie follows Turtles raised under the overprotective eye of their father, Master Splinter (Jackie Chan), who fears the worst in humanity after being shunned by them. The Turtles live in sewers that no sane person willingly visits, yet they yearn for that universal desire to live a normal life.

“That was a very early part of the pitch from Seth and Evan,” Rowe says. “It was something they thought was funny. Splinter’s a six-foot tall rat. If a humanoid rat went out in the world, people would try to kill it with fire. That’s something I’ve never seen Ninja Turtles do before. It acknowledges these fantastical things in a way that grounds them in the real world.”

Funny as it is to picture chasing giant rats, the filmmakers found a deeper emotional story. “That’s a great reason for Splinter to keep the family in the shadows,” says Rowe. “He’s a flawed dad who over-indexes on safety, and the Turtles are suffering because of that. It gives the Turtles something to long for because they’ve been denied it their entire lives.”

Pretty much everyone feels like a mutant between ages 13 and 19. “It’s a universal feeling of angst and anguish,” Rogen says. “From my experience, all teenagers feel a desire to be normal. That was the great marriage of plot and story. If you were a teenage mutant who’s relegated to the sewer but fully ingesting pop culture, you would want nothing more than a normal life.”

In a strange way, one might see Mutant Mayhem as a complementary double feature with Superbad “Superbad is about the same thing,” Rogen points out. “It’s a timeless feeling. ‘Why are we weird? Why aren’t we doing things that everyone else seems to be doing? Why aren’t we invited?’ All those ideas are so relatable and worked with the weird plot Mutant Mayhem has.”

The Way Of The Notebook Doodle

At first blush, Mutant Mayhem is unlike anything seen in TMNT history. The New York boroughs it takes place in aren’t characterized by clean lines and ultra-realistic fidelity. Instead, the movie wholly embraces the franchise’s roots in independent comics. It also references urban photography and the chaotic doodles that pack a high schooler’s notebook.

Audiences may catch vibes reminiscent of another groundbreaking reinterpretation of a comic book icon: Spider-Man, and the celebrated Spider-Verse movies. But Rowe says that Mutant Mayhem is striving for something different. “We get a lot of that,” the director admits, who sees the Spider-Verse films as slick, clean, and symmetrical. “We’re the opposite, but I do think a lot of films being made now owe a little bit of debt.”

Mutant Mayhem’s north star lay in something different than what the Spider-Verse franchise aims for. Going back to the teen spirit of the movie, the filmmakers’ goal was to mix what Rogen calls “the scribbly doodles you make in the back of your binder during class” with New York’s own storied history as the backdrop for trendy, high-contrast street photography.

“We looked at the drawings you make when you’re a teenager,” says Rowe. “Everything you learn in animation school is to simplify and unify shapes, but [as a teenager] you don’t know any of that. You’re drawing nostrils and acne. You render with care and focus, which is betrayed by the fact you have no formal training. It’s that interplay between passion and not knowing what you’re doing we tried to capture, because it felt so decidedly ‘teenage.’”

Rowe, whose film The Mitchells vs. The Machines had a similarly unbridled lo-fi look that bucked mainstream animation standards, says movies like Mutant Mayhem are indicative of a new emerging style. “It’s sketchy; it’s lumpy; it’s deconstructed. It’s a humanist style that emphasizes imperfection, while CG animation spent 30 years trying to make things photorealistic. This is steering the ship 180 degrees towards something impressionistic and not conventional.” He adds: “It’s rebellious, it’s relevant. It’s like grunge music.”

Let us not forget those beloved Ninja Turtles toys the filmmakers prized as kids. Of all the iconic franchises that pack a toy box, be it Transformers or Power Rangers, TMNT is marinated in gooeyness. “In the early ’90s, gross was an aesthetic,” says Rowe. The Ninja Turtles especially were “like molded plastic fever dreams.”

“They were so inventive… Like Michelangelo in a scuba suit had a starfish stuck to his butt. It had a huge influence on my taste, which is an appreciation and love for things that are weird and not slick and clean. It inspired me to tell stories and have a sense of humor.”

This appreciation dripped into the team’s approach to Mutant Mayhem

Seth Rogen says the filmmakers strove to keep what was drafted in the concept art. “I’ve been through this process so many times where you see the concept art and by the time you’re making the movie, it has lost all of its energy. That did not happen here,” he reveals. “It was asymmetrical and imperfect. I remember the first time seeing it dimensionalized, and it blew my mind.”