New trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is up.
I grew up in the Eighties, which this decade of the Naughties is desperate to emulate, with its revivals of He-Man, G. I. Joe, and TMNT. While I think it's great that today's kids have access to the quality programming that taught so many of my peers to venerate Saturday morning, it's also challenging to see these elements of my youth being reinvented in less-than-faithful ways.
In this instance, the TMNT movie doesn't look half bad. I've never seen the new animated series, so I don't know how this CGI film compares to it — but the movie seems to retain the combination of action and comedy that made the original show so captivating. (The tendency among my peers is to see the entertainment from their childhood mature along with them — but if it's a dark TMNT you want, go back to the original comic books.)
I'm worried about the animation style, though. The models all seem too comical, almost Pixar-ish, which I don't feel behooves what they're trying to do. Though "ninja turtles" is far from a plausible concept, I think the absurdity of the situation would be better served by realistic representations. Let the animation be the straight man; otherwise, the over-the-top actions and situations are likely to be dismissed as cartoonish. Juxtaposition — know what I mean?
I totally agree, they look like they bend and stretch a lot more than they should, and lean towards the awkward 13-year-old side of "teenage". I liked the humor in the trailer, though, and maybe those animation/design choices were made to keep things more lighthearted.
Took me a minute to figure out what "TMNT" means. :)
In Europe, the original cartoon was TMHT – Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Ninja (and especially nunchucks) were heavily censored back then.