The New "TMNT" Movie Got Me in My Feels
Animation is for Children AND Adults
I love how The Spider-Verse has lit a fire under every animation studio’s asses.
The unique comic book style is a cause for love and appreciation for the panel-driven medium, but it creates a style of storytelling in animation that is much better than when the two were kept separate.
It has also forced animators and character designers to shy away from the Perfect-Pixar-People (some might call it the CalArts style but I never went there, don’t really plan on it, but I’ve seen the Reddit threads). The round or square characters and their lovable/relatable/relevant design to signify personality. Basic shapes tied to Freudian levels of the human condition. Driven by years of animation knowledge about shapes humans identify with and how emotions can be drawn in the lightest of outlines.
But the thing about art is that we prescribe meaning to it. So we can make anything we want and give it a life and some sort of value. We can write up thematic elements or say the curtains are blue because the protagonist is sad or we can say the curtains are blue because the protagonist is colorblind.
Meaning is what we make of it, and the Spider-Verse crafting their own path in the medium echoes Miles Morales’ journey as the anomaly while also mirroring Sony Animation Studios’ attempt to revivify the medium.
While we’ve struggled to get representation into the arts (for POC, differently abled people, queer people, etc.), this TMNT movie feels like the next most obvious stage of any developing artform:
We’re going into abstract territory (like Picasso’s weird portraits) as we dissect the form and see how far can we push the boundary while still staying true to what makes animation, animation.
The characters in this movie are obviously turtles. [Great voice actors by the way. I love how youthful and happy they sound!] April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri) is awesome as an awkward girl who wants to be a journalist, but most every other character is some sort of caricature of what a human is supposed to look like.
Specifically Cynthia (Maya Rudolph).
She looks like a lopsided jug of water.
And the mutants are also wackadoodle but that’s the point. People don’t have to look like people, animals really don’t look like animals. But we see these characters and we know what and who they are. That’s a bad guy. That’s a good guy. I like how this guy looks.
People (and people is me, I am people) tend to conflate movie characters with their actors. That’s not healthy nor is it realistic to see a strapping young superhero rip his shirt off and expect every male to look like that. Or to see Margot Robbie in ANY MOVIE and expect all women to have the face of an angel sculpted by the gods.
As much as art represents the times and what we value in life, it should be acknowledged with a grain of salt. Oftentimes the stories that get made into films are the stories that have enough financial backing. Or Franchisability. Or celebrity casts. Or, or, or. The art that we see made on the screen has been curated, and we should be asking what that means and who is doing the curating.
But that’s a thesis-level dissertation that I don’t feel like getting into right now.
And anyways I just wanted to say animation is badass.
There is so much that can be done with the animation medium to push what we see on the screen, and this $100+ million blockbuster is just the beginning of what more we can do.
And that’s really exciting.
Okay real talk but in terms of story? I liked it! Again, this is one of those things where you have to (very obviously) set aside your disbelief for the idea that teenage mutant ninja turtles would be roaming around NY and fighting for our safety. BUT you also have to keep your belief suspended to believe that these mutant kids would be so readily accepted by society.
At every moment where they were shown to humans, I unconsciously gripped my seat because I felt the pain building, the feeling that as good as our boys are, anything but looking like the norm will punish them.
The fear of not being accepted. The tragedy of trying and failing to be a good person. People’s prejudices weighing on you when you’re only just a kid.
At its core, “TMNT: Mutant Mayhem” is about wanting to fit in, but not changing who you are to do it. And for a movie marketed at kids, for kids, by the biggest (and very notable and successful) kids who never grew up, this movie does wonders for allowing us to dream that we can be accepted.
We can be loved.
We can, maybe, be good people.