TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM Review: The Best Animated Movie of the Year

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is candy for animation fans from its opening moments. The “camera” moves through the three dimensional spaces of the film that are drawn in beautifully unique two dimensional art with heavy crayon and chalk lines. Whip pans are communicated with flashes of painted brushstrokes. Flickering lights are animated with chaotic tangles of bright white lines.

And that’s just in the opening scene. Throughout the film, the interplay between light and shadow in this animated world should make it a contender for Best Cinematography awards. Mutant Mayhem includes the alternating color lights of police cars (often made more visually exciting by movement during chases), multiple light sources producing multiple colors of light on any given street in New York City, and several iridescent plot-specific items like the bright green “ooze” that turned the titular turtles into mutants and the blue solution fired from special guns that can unmutate mutants.

But wait there’s more than just the awesome light work on display in this animated world! The fur on mammals in the film somehow manages to look both obviously hand drawn and like something you could reach out and touch; it's a perfect meeting of frantic crayon lines and the 3D rendering that I’ve never seen a 2D/3D combination animated film achieve before.

There are some brief inclusions of archival live action footage, mostly from martial arts how-two VHSs and Kung Fu films from the 1970s, that are injected into the animated world, often existing within a larger animated space and sometimes with animation overlaid. One sequence shows the turtles fantasizing about high school and renders their imagined first day in an entirely two dimensional art style that looks as if the already animated and fantastical world of the film were rotoscoped by children.

What makes this fodder for animation fans even more impressive is that in this world made of many chaotic and overlapping lines, the scenes of action are incredibly clear. As a movie about ninjas (whether they be mutant turtle teenagers or not), there’s a requisite amount of hand to hand combat Mutant Mayhem has to offer, and it more than delivers. The scenes of combat are exciting and creative, with several different mutant animals making use of their unique animal abilities. Every fight makes great use of the specific environment, which makes an already brilliant lateral tracking shot that cuts between each of the four turtle brothers and the different environments they are fighting through even more wonderful.

The music in the film keeps pace with and augments the delightfully overwhelming aesthetic experience. An expectedly phenomenal score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross brings their years as both industrial rock icons and Academy Award-winning score composers to bear on the film’s sonic landscape. While the soundtrack full of hip-hop classics (some which I was surprised could be played in a children’s film) and can’t-help-but-singalong pop songs lends the New York of the film a sense of place and develops its characters through their relationships to the music.

The jokes in the film overwhelmingly land well, with several full-theater laugh-out-loud moments throughout, though it is a bit tiring that so much of the humor is reference based, albeit thankfully not only nostalgic, backwards-pointing references for fans of the TMNT property. It’s also the first time in a long time that vocal performances have stood out in an animated film, particularly those from Ayo Edebiri as April O’Neil and Ice Cube as the villainous Superfly.

If anything holds the film back it’s the fairly standard narrative that ultimately gives way to an unnecessarily long large-scale action finale that’s never bad but doesn’t need to be as big and time-consuming as it is. And despite it's well-worn plot beats, there are ideas in the story that are meaningfully engaged, particularly those of social acceptance of different groups and the spectrum of reactions to the lack of that acceptance that keep it above the fray of children’s films with less on their minds.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem isn’t perfect, but it’s probably as close as a children’s action movie based on forty year old IP can get, and it’s certainly a must see for fans of animation, especially those who loved The Mitchells vs. The Machines and Wolfwalkers earlier this decade.