I’ll go ahead and confirm it for you: Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem not-so-shamelessly rips off the Spider-Verse movies in about every way you can imagine. It’s a hyper-stylized depiction of a property that has seen all sorts of adaptations to the screens, both silver and static-coated. Hell, this isn’t even the first time an animated Turtles movie has made its way to the big screen, with 2007’s TMNT providing the perfect cover for teenagers looking to sneak into Grindhouse at their local Regal (sorry, mom and dad), even if it didn’t necessarily bring home the box-office bacon. It’s a Noo Yawk movie through and through: Grime on the Times Square walls, Wu-Tang on the soundtrack, and local ephemera scattered throughout. It’s pitched at the younger elements of Gen Z, but takes great pains to include Turtle nerds of all stripes in how it handles its characters’ almost 40-year presence in popular culture. In short, it’s the best-case scenario for one of these features: By taking the applicable aspects of Spider-Verse and applying them to the Ninja Turtles, Rowe (along with producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) crafts an affectionate and sensitive pastiche, smart enough to distinguish itself from its inspiration in aesthetics and substance while retaining enough of what made that film such a medium-forwarding event in animation circles.
Mutant Mayhem is a traditionalist reinvention of the Turtles’ origins, which preserves a great deal of the source material’s spirit while altering others to make the puzzle pieces fit perfectly. The Turtles – Donatello (Micah Abbey), Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu), Raphael (Brady Noon), and Michelangelo (Shamon Brown, Jr.) – are teenagers here, and the film’s set right when they first begin to trek and interact with the world above their sewer. Ever since Dr. Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Stanton) invented the ooze and sacrificed his life to protect his still-gestating mutant creatures from the long arms of a megacorporation, they’ve lived under the watchful eye of Splinter (Jackie Chan), who loves them dearly – he resembles a cardigan-wearing grandpa here more than a ninjitsu sensei – and deeply fears what might happen if they were to interact with the humans. He tried that once, back when they were babies, and it went predictably poorly, with all of Times Square gathering together to hurl shit at a weird-looking group of mutants they didn’t really understand or care to empathize with (well, after all, Splinter is a giant rat). But the Turtles want more out of life, and they go on fun little adventures around New York when they’re supposed to be running errands for their adopted father.
Yet it’s when they cross paths with a high school student, April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), a would-be journalist known by her peers as “Puke Girl” for an incident that occurred the first time she was on camera, that the Turtles have their first brush with heroism. Thanks to them distracting her, April’s scooter gets stolen by a chop-shop gang, and the foursome has to use their kung fu and ninja skills to get it back, with the scene unfolding in pure slapstick fashion (the film’s best fight scene, however, belongs to another character). In that chop shop, they learn about their first major villain – Superfly (Ice Cube) – and begin their friendship with April, in which they formulate a plan to make the humans like them. If they can go out and become big enough heroes, then New Yorkers will love them no matter what. But Superfly, a fellow mutant with his own gang of goofy creatures, has another plan for acceptance: “Acceptance” comes through eliminating all those who don’t forthrightly accept the mutants for who they are, which means pretty much all of humanity. Not to mention that Splinter might have some things to say about his kids staying out too late on school nights. If they went to high school, that is.
The first major alteration to the Spider-Verse formula comes in the textures and colors of the animation. Where Lord and Miller took a mixed-media approach – preserving the elemental nature of the characters as they converged on a single universe – Rowe goes for grime, giving the film a nearly claymated texture. Weirdly enough, it reminded me a ton of The PJs, the Eddie Murphy UPN sitcom that I, for whatever reason, have plenty of beloved memories of (and that show is still a banger, so fuck off if you disagree). If Spider-Man is all about the city lights reflected off of a skyscraper’s window, the Ninja Turtles are toxic sludge and back alleys rendered in a pseudo-florescence like a proper alternative comic. Everything about this movie is beautifully ugly: the human characters look like freakshow approximations of human life, to which the (comparable) smoothness of the Turtles stands out in fun contrast. Even better are the designs of the mutants, which range from a cyberpunk bat to a one-eyed manta ray to a Salamander who dresses like a “cool” ‘90s teen, complete with broski-banter (and of course, he’s voiced by Paul Rudd, who sells that shit for all that it’s worth). It’s like the Sobe logo became sentient, and it, along with the rest of the movie, is desperately amusing in its own right.
The film lacks the whip-fire nature of the Spider-Verse humor, but its own variation on that is understandable given the difference in the intended audience: Spider-Man is broadly popular in a way that the Turtles aren’t, especially because the character’s been around for roughly two decades longer than them. The film’s humor skews younger and grosser – there are lots of jokes about the Turtles being experimented on by the humans and being milked – but the cast manages to sell it, especially Chan, who turns in a hyperactive and yet thoughtful voice performance. Again, this movie is flat-out for children, and a juvenile sense of humor is just part of the course. It’s complimented nicely by a swell visual sense of humor, which manifests itself well in the pacing: vomiting is, of course, funny as hell, but it’s even funnier when done with a keen eye for slow motion. That’s right, I’m positively describing Mutant Mayhem’s approach to vomiting gags. It will make children howl with laughter and their parents amused and embarrassed in equal measure, which I think is the appropriate tone a Ninja Turtles movie should take.
It should go without saying that Mutant Mayhem is probably the best version of the Ninja Turtles story that’s been brought to the screen, though that will require one to remove their nostalgia-laden rose-colored glasses and just admit that those original live-action movies, as fun as they are, aren’t too awesome (the decision to hold off on Shredder, the Turtles’ most iconic villain, is also a good one, given that Superfly and his mutants are purpose-built for an animated project like this). There’s more than enough here to entertain all comers, though the special emphasis on what the kids would find amusing is deserving of some commendation, given how often animated movies start seeing Oscars dancing in their dreams like sugarplums.
And, even better, it offers up a proper path on how to appropriate the lessons learned from something like Spider-Verse without doing a fucking “multiverse” concept, a rarity now, given Hollywood’s attraction to its IP-encompassing complexity. Mutant Mayhem proves that you can retain the aesthetic complexity of a film like that while also making it simpler, and it serves well as a big-screen introduction for a new generation of Turtle nerds. Cowabunga, dudes.