Wednesday With Turtles

Aside from a bit of the usual walk around the neighborhood to do some shopping I got this in the mail. I’d been extremely curious about it ever since I saw the trailer, and a lucky day on eBay with seemingly no one interested in the Blu Ray netted me the disc at a surprisingly low price.

So now I have watched TMNT in high-def. Was it a good movie for me? Yes? Did I enjoy it? Yes. Is it as good or better than the best of Old Disney, Miyazaki or Pixar? Not on your life.

Your mileage may vary based on your personal experience with the eponymous Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’ve heard some off the cuff remarks of “This ain’t your father’s TMNT” and I find myself strongly disagreeing with that. The thing is, this IS your father’s TMNT, what it isn’t is your older brother or cousin’s TMNT. For most people the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a bright, bouncy, puerile animated series in the 90’s with essentially hazard-free adventure, pizza loving cuteness, and now forever grating–at least to me–TMNTism of “Cowabunga.” Or, it is a couple of movies that have short martial artists in rubber suits, slowly performing Ninja-ry hi-jinks in their prosthetics while Vanilla Ice enthusiastically encourages them with rap.

The problem here is, the teenage mutant ninja turtles didn’t begin in the 90’s with an animated series. They began in the 80’s with an independent comic book. Life for the turtles began in 1984 as black and white indie comic put out by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and was actually a semi-satirical take on the gritty Frank Miller aesthetic that was already taking over the comics industry (and would help to ruin it to some degree for the next decade) even back then. This was not a story about fun lovin’ “turtle dudes” that talked like surfers, loved pizza and occasionally battled with ninjas for fun and… more fun. Riffing off of everything from the origin of Daredevil to Miller’s Ronin, these turtles were deadly serious about their duty to kill a villain named the shredder, and when they got into fights, there was plenty of injury amputation and bloodshed. The comic walked a fine line between telling a story of its own and poking fun at some of the conventions of the day, and it became first a cult hit, and then gradually the monstrous merchandising machine that became the cartoons and movies most people think of today.

This was my first experience with the turtles, so I’m one of those curmudgeonly Elder Geek types that grumbles about the popular associations of the turtles with most people today. I remember a group that was actually very capable in combat, agile, serious, and bound by a similar code of honor as the samurai of Japan. They just happened to be reptilian.

This new CG animated film went a long way towards repairing the damage that the other media have inflicted on the series in the last few years. Taking an art design that matches some of the environmental realism of high end CG productions with a character design that is simpler and more Pixar-ish than Final Fantasy, this TMNT movie manages to approach a ratio of about 65% original comic and 45% animated series and movies in tone. The story itself seems to be a sequel from the live action movies, with Shredder already defeated and the turtles themselves having lost some purpose and gone their separate ways. Like the cartoons, they more easily identified by their differently colored masks, and like the cartoons, they can still be seen eating pizza, and Michaelangelo is still the joker of the group, with Donatello being more technologically oriented.

Everything else however seems to be taken from the comic, or as far into the comic as you can go with a PG rating. Raphael is definitely more of a loose cannon “Wolvie/Berserker” type, as he was in the comics. Leonardo is far more serious and concerned with concepts like duty and honor. And of course, there is the action. For the first time, these guys moved the way I had always imagined they would. Athletic, dynamic and dangerous. No other previous attempt has ever accurately rendered the turtles in action, but this one has done it.

The story moves along, and is never dull, though there are some pacing issues, some characterization that could have been developed, and there is never really a truly stand out moment plot/characterwise, though none of it is ever done badly. The story and characters never fall, but they don’t exactly soar either. The action however, is extremely well done, and the state of the CG animation and modeling is quite impressive. I think part of this might be that the movie is on Blu Ray, so this gave the film creators the ability to do virtually perfect transfer as they there was no loss of image quality due to attempt to compress it to get it all to fit on a disc. The end result is some of the most detailed animation I’ve ever seen, with some insane bells and whistles such as the fight between Raphael and Leonardo that takes place in the rain, and you can make out every single raindrop, and see every last one bounce off their shells and heads as they fight.

But probably the most impressive thing to me about this movie (aside from the fact that writer/director Kevin Munroe is an admitted fan of the original comics) is that this is NOT an American production. The animation was actually done by Imagi Studios in Hong Kong, and it makes a VERY impressive statement about what their animation industry is like now. I had thought that the only decent CG animation in the world was currently coming out of either America, or Japan, but if this is any indication of the future, then those guys in Hong Kong are gonna’ be one to watch.