TURTLE POWER!

MUTANT MAYHEM DIRECTOR JEFF ROWE TAKES US INTO THE SEWERS TO MEET THE NEWEST VERSION OF THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

- JACK SHEPHERD

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 Mutant Mayhem. Rowe - along with screenwriting duos Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Superbad, Sausage Party) and Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit (Pokémon Detective Pikachu, The Addams Family 2) - has created a film that plays into our general nostalgia for the pizza-loving brothers while also defying our expectations of who the Ninja Turtles are. A prominent example of that is the way the Turtles' backstory has been changed. While Rowe won't go into exact details - and the first trailer includes a reference to the "ooze" the Turtles normally fall into - the filmmaker calls it a "significant" change to the characters.

"It totally makes sense for the story," he says. "If you read about it, and you're a fan, you'd be like, 'Wait a minute!' [But we made] little canon changes because we put so much work into trying to make the movie feel like it could exist within our real world, and trying to ascribe logic to a lot of things that were made up by a toy company in the '80s to sell toys and don't necessarily make sense.