Narrating the sequence, the director Jeff Rowe said that it is “the first time that we get to see them fight or be crime fighters in the way that the Ninja Turtles traditionally are. And we really wanted to make them not good at it upfront.”
The characters bumble around and take blows, but ultimately somewhat find their groove in this scene that uses the animation style itself to illustrate some of the mayhem. The smoke, for instance, is 2-D animation placed on top of the 3-D animation to create a scribbled, hand-drawn quality.
Rowe said his team looked at the work of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, studying animation that involved scratching on the film negative, in an effort to “create something that was chaotic and not traditionally beautiful in the animated sense.”
Read the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” review.
Read about how the “Spider-Verse” films’ animation style have inspired movies like “Mutant Mayhem.”
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