These turtles, be they heroes or ninjas, popping up in comics or animation form, have never been much of a part of my pop cultural universe, but I’d have to be pretty dead inside not to love this piece of absolutely brilliant animation by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears.
It counteracts the often too great slickness of your typical US digital animation by using glitches, smudges, and influences of the parts of visual arts that aren’t slick, but never as a pose like those movies that add artificial burn marks tend to do. Instead, the added grubbiness and grit is part of the aesthetics as well as of the thematic mission of a film that’s telling us that old, true story of the deep worth of the weird, the freakish, and the slightly off in the proper way, by being all that itself. It’s also disarmingly charming, fast, fun, clever and energetic in a way only a very stubborn kind of anarchist would not call anarchic.
Really, the only element of the film I had some trouble with its need to make its moral (shudder) as explicit as possible during its final act, because if there’s one strain running through the most conservative and the most progressive US art meant for children and their families, it’s the assumption of such braindead stupidity, you apparently have to tell them badly what you’ve just shown them much more convincingly. Of course, the rest of the film is so riveting, fun and outright charming, featuring some of the best uses of classic hip hop and even ESG you’ll encounter anywhere, and so convincingly positive – not naïve - in its outlook, I’ll accept the fall into needless obviousness as its cost of doing business (and of getting Jackie Chan to voice act Splinter?).
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