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April 23, 2007

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Lean, Green, Teen Beat

By Andrew

What childhood is and how it is experienced is always changing from one generation to the next. I'm only 23 years old, and even I don't understand these kids today - what with their Bionicles, and their Zac Effrons, and their 12-button video game controllers.

To remedy this, I wanted to see the latest 21st century Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie - rendered completely in CGI, and known simply as TMNT. I thought it might provide a good measure of how different kids today are from the kid I once was. See, I'm old enough (or is it young enough?) and middle-class enough to have experienced the first wave of Turtle mania in its entirety: eating TMNT breakfast cereal at home, rocking the TMNT t-shirt to school, blistering my fingers on the series of NES games (only 5 buttons on our controllers, thank you very much), and all that.

For whatever reason - probably having to do with time and money, the grown-up's ever-present foil - I didn't make it to the new TMNT. I did manage to rewatch the first 20th century Turtles film - 1990's completely live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - and it provided a measure of a different sort: how much I myself have changed since I was prepubescent Turtle devotee.

After all these years, I wasn't surprised to find how familiar the story-line was. Four giant, wise-cracking, fifteen-year old humanoid turtles - Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rapheal - befriend human reporter April O'Neil and ex-hockey player turned crime-fighter Casey Jones. Together they find themselves entangled in a battle with Japanese crime boss Shredder when Splinter, the turtles' martial arts mentor and a giant rat, is taken hostage. Given this was the same plot as the first TMNT video game, no wonder I remember it.

What did surprise me is how well the film is made, given how ludicrous the whole story is to begin with. Wrapped in a giant overcoat and fedora hat, a giant turtle trudges out of a movie theater and into New York City's anonymous crowds, muttering to himself, "Where do they come up with this stuff?" This is an early scene with Raphael, the turtle with anger management issues ("cool but rude," as the cartoon theme song explained), and it sums up the strange maturity the film has, despite its children's movie premises (This maturity, if I can remember correctly, was completely abandoned by the TMNT sequels, Secret of the Ooze and Turtles in Time).

As teenagers, the mutant ninja turtles are believable; for one, they exist in a symbiotic relationship with pop culture. A poster in the background tells us Raph has just seen Critters, one of the many pop culture references that pepper the film throughout, everything from Gilligan's Island to Domino's pizza and Kodak film (as always, pop references double as product placement). Also included are the turtles doing their best Rocky and James Cagney impressions, and the Cagney reference adds to the dark noir feel of the whole production. Nothing is overly lit or over produced - for all the turtles' teenage behavior, their environment maintains a certain grit really unusual for a film like this.

As when Raph wanders the busy streets alone, the location of New York City is given frequent emphasis. When the turtles retreat momentarily to a farm in the countryside, the film takes on a coming-of-age quality, wedding some of the mature elements of the comic book (from which much of the film is heavily drawn) with the goofy playfulness of the children's cartoon. I was also astonished to find a now-accomplished actor playing the pig-headed but lovable Casey Jones: Elias Koteas, whom I know best as Captain Staros in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Koteas gives Casey a likable idiocy - again, rare for a children's film in that it's not totally grating.

In fact, the stupidest thing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not the teenage, mutant turtles - against the backdrop of the very noir-like production values, these things actually give the picture a fun, playful, self-referential character. No, the stupidest thing about the picture has to do with the ninja. One only need hear the gong sound that signals Shredder's entrance to recognize how so many of the martial arts tropes in the film follow directly from the history of Hollywood's racist portrayals of Asian cultures.

When Splinter lectures on about the "mysterious art of ninjitsu," he sounds more than a little like Mister Miyagi of Karate Kid fame. Moreover, much of the Shredder-led "silent crime wave" story line unmistakably has parallels with white America's fears of Japanese economic encroachment that emerged in the 1980s. These are the sorts of things you never notice when you're eight years old.

Yes, eight years old. Funny thing is, like the largely female readership of Teen/Seventeen/Teen People-type magazines, the bulk of the adolescent male audience for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles isn't even "teenage" yet. They're children and pre-teens who can't wait for the "responsibilities" of the life ahead of them, like car keys and R-rated movies.

But the "teenager," in the end, is just as real as mutant ninja turtles: as a concept, it emerged with the Baby Boom. Since, it has come to denote a demographic envied on all sides by both young and old, a group somehow carefree, with cash to burn (and with the automobile, with rubber to burn too), living as one with popular culture - like the turtles do with their on-going banter, or like, say, like the ever present radio broadcast of American Graffiti: an industry always there to provide your backbeat for you. Like the days and nights of Graffiti, they are years we're often nostalgic for mere months after their passing. In watching the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I did my best to keep a distance, without forgetting how much fun the film was when I first saw it, yet also remembering that industries never have your best interests in mind, especially when you're young and impressionable.

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