WHENEVER A NEW version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comes along, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael are always three things: they are mutants; they are ninjas; and they are turtles. They are, however, very rarely actually teenagers, and that’s something Jeff Rowe – the director behind the half-shell heroes’ next big-screen animated outing Mutant Mayhem – wanted to correct.
“We wanted a teenager to watch the movie and feel seen by it and understood,” he tells SFX. “That was our cornerstone for everything, like making the Turtles not hulking, ripped versions of themselves, but lanky and awkward. That carried through into casting actual teenagers. It’s insane that it had never been done before.”
“Insane” may be a good way to describe a lot of . Rowe – along with screenwriting duos Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (, ) and Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit (, ) – has created a film that plays into our general nostalgia for the pizza-loving brothers while also defying our expectations of who
