Hacker Cinema
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
2023 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Jeff Rowe
AnimationComedyActionScience Fiction
After years of being sheltered from the human world, the Turtle brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts. Their new friend April O'Neil helps them take on a mysterious crime syndicate, but they soon get in over their heads when an army of mutants is unleashed upon them.
2 positive1 neutralfrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
A not insignificant part of human history is retelling the same stories. Stories like the Odyssey and the Iliad were oral traditions refined, refined, and refined, until taken down by a master. Every time Dracula and derivatives get made, something new gets added, changed, improved.
The problem with Disney's remakes is that they are trying to be the original story, reshot, but LESS Disney. The Little Mermaid is a prime example of something that should have been brighter, more colorful, more energetic, more beautiful, and IMPROVED, but instead they chose a least common denominator impersonation.
The concept of going back and retelling a prequel can work. It worked for Rogue One (despite production challenges), it worked for Wicked. What isn't working for the Disney Live Action movies is letting the machine output reduced facsimiles, instead of giving the projects to experimental storytellers, or master storytellers to do their thing.
Id love to see a remake of Bambi that amplified the music/animation connection, using modern technology to sync the movement of elements in the frame to parts of the musical composition, much like a visualizer. Breathing, fluttering, raindrops falling on the beats, quivering with the strings. Imagine a modern Little April Showers by Atticus Ross that looks like Spiderm-Man into the Spiderverse or Puss in Boots 3 or Wild Robot or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Bambi should be a music video like Fantasia. Instead Disney will try and tell a story about a Deer, and forget the rest of what made Bambi so revolutionary.
And yet, Disney still does make things like Soul, which really was innovative in its animation style by how restrained it was. It's simple complexity of its dream world was its strength. Animation can be done well without the hyper speed over indulgences I cited above as good examples.
> And still it didn’t sound quite right. So we dug out our Blu-ray and popped it in, and there it was: the pristine sounds of Junkie XL’s warring drums and guitars coming out of our soundbar.
Pretty laughable commenting about how 'bad' the audio quality sounded coming from a soundbar.
> You might be asking, if I am so annoyed by watching movies on Max, Disney+, Netflix, and the rest, why don’t I just watch them from my film snob collection? Funny you should ask, because it’s a not-so-funny story: I moved during the pandemic and someone stole our physical media collection—save for one box of our absolute faves. That’s right, somewhere in the Valley someone acquired a film school’s worth of greatest movies on Blu-ray and DVDs right off the curb next to a moving truck. Rude.
Funny, this is a point in favor of streaming media. Nothing to steal, nothing to get lost, nothing to keep or move or take up space.
> Our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza box collection? Gone. How did we realize? Shortly before watching Mutant Mayhem we looked through our box. It wasn’t there...
How much time is the author wasting rummaging through her boxes of movies/TV looking for stuff?
I'm all for 'original content' not muddied by constant re-compression and reauthoring, but rip the physical media and get rid of it.
> one of the reasons I don't like modern animation is the lack of effort in the actual animating.
The new Ninja Turtles and Spider-Man movies certainly contradict that, as do plenty of animations from Japan such as anything by Satoshi Kon.
Yes, there’s a lot more garbage today but that because there’s a lot more of it in general. The good stuff is going strong and there’s innovation still happening.
South Park is a bad example for the argument, because it’s atypical in many ways. They do the whole episode in under a week, including the writing and animation, and the cast is basically the creators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles:_Mutant_Mayhem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Across_the_Spider-Verse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_Days_to_Air