Like the Spider-verse reboot, this new animated take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise completely reimagines the vibe for a more discerning target audience, namely young people who have a stake in the culture that the source material ostensibly addresses. By bringing in people who have proven ability to appeal to actual teenagers, from soundtrack composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to co-screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the producers allow the characters’ adolescent freak flag to fly freely, with the result being a much more entertaining movie than any of the previous ones, which mostly tried to be something for everyone. Rightly, they also went back to the beginning, and the origin story is funnier for the kind of animation used, which looks like stop-motion but seems to be a synthesis of different styles. 

One thing’s for sure, the frantic pace likely matches the brain function of teens who play video games and surf the net at breakneck speeds. If I hadn’t seen the previous Turtle movies I might not have fully appreciated how adept director Jeff Rowe is at telling a story with such economy and precision. We get the weird scientist, Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito), losing a vial of his mutation agent down a New York City drain, where it gets into the sewage system and creates a whole menagerie of mutants. Our heroes are babies rescued from the sludge by the kung-fu practicing rat, Splinter (Jackie Chan), who has been traumatized by his ventures to the surface world and raises his four boys (voiced by non-famous actors) to shun that world. They do have to occasionally go up top to filch supplies, including their beloved pizza, and so Splinter teaches them Asian martial arts for self-defense purposes. As adolescent boys do, they long for connection to their own cohort and secretly aspire to going to school, things they know about because they spend so much time on the internet, but of course their “father” would forbid it. After they meet April (Ayo Edebiri), a nerdish girl with journalistic pretensions, they can’t get the idea of integrating out of their minds, and together the five take on Superfly (Ice Cube), a mutant fly that plans to use some kind of farout machine to turn all the inhabitants of NYC into mutants.

What’s particularly attractive about the production is how seamlessly it integrates the furious action elements into a typical goofy teen self-expression story. Rogen and Goldberg bring the same spirit of irreverent abandon to the presentation that they did to such classics as Superbad, and the humorous back-and-forth, not only among the Turtles but among the nominal villains, in imbued with a crackling, throwaway wit that never flags. Even the scatology and gross-out stuff (April tends to throw up without much warning) is done with a light touch. Let’s hope there’s more of this to come. 

Opens Sept. 22 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku PIccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem home page in Japanese

photo (c) Paramount Pictures