Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which is skateboarding into theaters this week, is the culmination of a particularly challenging pipeline for Vancouver animation studio Cinesite.

In the works since 2020, the film is the latest effort to reboot the classic IP about crime-fighting, pizza-loving turtles from Nickelodeon Movies and Point Grey Pictures. French-Canadian studio Mikros Animation was hired in 2022 to handle the bulk of the animation work, and then in August 2022, Cinesite was also brought in to produce nearly 25 minutes of footage. 

The problem? The studio’s staffers were pros at CG animation, so when the film called for some 2D, they had to learn fast, says animation supervisor Eric Cheung. But the whole team took away some valuable lessons from stepping out of their comfort zone to pull this off. 

“TMNT was full steam ahead when we joined,” Cheung recalls, and the studio had to get to work replicating the film’s highly distinct art style.   

Though it’s billed as a CG-animated reboot, the film’s stylized aesthetic meant 2D elements had to be created and blended in to achieve the sketchbook look—where “the drawings are messy and nothing is perfect,” Cheung says.

To work quickly and find its footing in this unfamiliar terrain, the team sought out sequences and style guides from Mikros. “We also immediately assembled a group of five traditional 2D effects animators [to train the team.] And we got the software that they use—which was Toon Boom—into our pipeline,” says VFX supervisor Chris Kazmier.

Using these resources and tools, they quickly developed internal animation tests with regular feedback from director Jeff Rowe (The Mitchells vs The Machines) on whether it was accurately matching Mikros’ work so far. 

Mutant Mayhem notably also features an “animation on 2s” technique, where every pose is held for an extra frame, giving scenes a more frantic, frenzied energy. This meant dealing with a lot more layers than traditional CG, Kazmier explains. “[Mikros] had a lot more time to develop this look, so we had to kind of do the quick version of that.”

To do it quickly, Kazmier steered animators towards “a more gritty, toothy and edgy” look. This meant flagging shots that were starting to look too pretty. For instance, when a right-handed artist was creating a beautiful visual of smoke and fire, Kazmier advised her to do it with her left hand instead, to give the scene a more imperfect feel.

This refreshed style has drawn eyeballs to the project and already seems to be working in its favor; the TMNT feature film is tracking towards doing US$37 million to US$49 million in its five-day domestic debut (against a US$70-million budget), as per Box Office Pro. And significantly, before it even hit theaters, Paramount had greenlit a Mutant Mayhem sequel and a spin-off series.  

Mutant Mayhem is benefiting from the lucrative box-office trend of kids gravitating towards animated films that aren’t photo-realistic, Cheung observes. Recent movies such as Across the Spider-Verse (which has grossed more than US$680 million globally this year) and The Mitchells vs the Machines (which became Netflix’s most-viewed animated title in Q2 2021) are just two successful examples that illustrate how the art style is drawing kids in, he says. 

Another big gain from taking this approach was that they could render the content fast, Kazmier says, since traditional CG requires more rendering time. If producers are looking to do everything with a less realistic style, however, it’s going to require more compositing (combining multiple elements together to make one image), which can be a slow process. 

Cinesite’s next project is The Smurfs movie, due out in 2025. Even though this pic’s visual feel couldn’t be more different from the grittiness of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Kazmier says the team is looking to bring some of the techniques they learned over the past year into this new project.