So of course I wound up taking Paul to that Ninja Turtle movie. I wouldn't bother going on about this, but the thing made serious if unspectacular money this past weekend, and might be worth considering as the shapes of things to come.
I have no idea who or what the filmmakers saw as the target audience for this thing. In their original comic book incarnation, the Ninja Turtles were basically a parody of several recent trends in comics fandom. (The ninja aspect was specifically riffing on Frank Miller, the non-genius writer/artist who gave us 300...and more on that later.) But as it mutated into a TV cartoon and those mostly lame live action movies from the early nineties, it became specifically kiddie-oriented.
As it should be, I suppose. Despite all their self-conscious airs, such recent movies as Batman Begins and Superman Returns seem awfully silly, asking us to take guys in tights seriously as tragic, conflicted figures. They're superheroes, people! As a guy who has shelves stuffed full of Godzilla movies, I probably have no business getting on a high horse, but at least I have a sense of perspective: A superhero movie should be fun, not dark, and it should be, if not aimed at kids, at least accessible to them.
And if those superheroes are skateboarding, pizza-eating turtles, all the more so. Yet TMNT (and I can't say this enough: Awful title!) opens with reams of exposition, positing itself as a direct sequel to the earlier Turtle pictures, which were made before this movie's target audience was even born. The story is so pointlessly convoluted, lacking even a clear-cut, hissable villain, that Paul--who's seven, and quite bright--repeatedly asked me to clarify what was going on, and I had to tell him, I had no idea.
So there's that. Then there's the movie's hideous visuals. CGI wasn't a bad way to go for this material, and since it's set mostly at night, we're largely spared the depressing sight of computer-simulated sunlight (again, I'll get to 300 shortly), but aside from our titular heroes, the character designs are eye-punishingly hideous. Human characters are designed and animated by people with no apparent knowledge of anatomy (the exception is the quasi-villain, who endearingly resembles Peter Lupus), and the Turtles' Yoda figure, the talking rat Splinter, resembles Chester Cheeto reborn as a sports mascot. Some of the action scenes are well-staged, but most of the animation is clumsy--it's the CGI equivalent of mid-seventies Hanna-Barbera.
Optimistically, I'd like to find something positive in the film's success. I'm not sure that an animated film aimed at ten-year-olds instead of five-year-olds is progress, but it might at least suggest to studio heads that animation can be used for something other than talking animal movies. Who knows? Future superhero franchise movies might go the animated route from the start, which would at least prevent the jarring moments in which our heroes switch from being real actors in costumes to obvious, cartoonishly-rendered CGI creations.
Sadly, TMNT is likely a gateway movie. Kids reared on this will turn into adults who will willingly pay to see 300, who will gladly experience its empty style as empty sensation, who will be troubled not a second by its noxious homophobia and desperately closeted homoeroticism, who will not recognize its transparent misogyny, who will enjoy its hazy, joyless visuals and its vision of mountains and plains and skies as recreated by people who have never taken the time to enjoy the real thing.
They'll never see a real movie, or live in the real world, and they'll never know--or care--what they're missing.
