New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated film gets dream casting with Jackie Chan
SAN DIEGO – The creators of the new animated superhero movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, are long-time fans of Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan.
So when it came to assembling a voice cast for the Hollywood film, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Thursday, the 69-year-old actor was their dream pick to play Splinter – a rat who is both father figure and martial arts instructor to the titular turtles, four crime-fighting mutants living in the sewers of New York.
And not only did Chan say yes to the job, but he also blew them away with his performance, says the movie’s American director Jeff Rowe, who co-wrote the screenplay with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the Canadian writing duo behind comedies such as Superbad (2007) and Pineapple Express (2008).
The trio took inspiration from some of Chan’s most beloved action films, such as Police Story (1985) and Rumble In The Bronx (1995), to create some of the turtles’ comedic fight scenes.
“I adore him, I adore his films, he’s so funny and no one does action comedy like him,” says Rowe, 37, at a comic book convention in San Diego earlier in 2023.
He initially thought Chan was too big a celebrity to say yes to appearing in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.
“But then he did. And we would record him at 6am our time because he was in Beijing, and we would drag ourselves out of bed, then leave those sessions screaming, we were so hyped up.
“It was just, like, ‘That was amazing, he’s so funny. Can you believe we just talked to Jackie Chan for an hour?’” recalls Rowe, who co-wrote and co-directed the animated comedy The Mitchells Vs The Machines (2021).
The relationship between Splinter and the four turtles is also the emotional bedrock of the film.
In it, turtle brothers Leonardo (Nicolas Cantu), Donatello (Micah Abbey), Raphael (Brady Noon) and Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr) take on a crime syndicate while also striving to be accepted as normal teens.
“We really wanted to ground the movie emotionally, and I think that relationship has been underexplored in some of the (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) films of the past,” says Rowe.
“There’s such an interesting family dynamic there. Splinter is like a surrogate father, and they’re not necessarily biologically related, but he’s a single dad raising four brothers, and that’s an emotional story.”
The new film is also a bit of a throwback to the franchise’s beginnings.
It all started with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, an underground comic book self-published in 1984 by creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, who were parodying superheroes such as Marvel’s Daredevil.
The adventures of the four turtles – who mutate into wisecracking martial arts whizzes after being exposed to a radioactive substance – proved so popular that the series continued till 2014.
And they inspired a hit cartoon television show (2003 to 2009) as well as six films (1990 to 2016) that earned more than US$1.7 billion (S$2.3 billion) in total at the global box office.
For the seventh film, actor and film-maker Rogen – who is also a member of the voice cast portraying a mutant villain, along with American rappers Post Malone and Ice Cube – wanted to explore the teenage aspect of the characters.
Rowe says: “It really started with us focusing on the teenage part, which in early conversations with Seth, always felt like the most underserved of the four descriptors of the title, and we wanted to cast actual teenagers and create something that felt authentic.”
The unusual style of the computer animation – which has lots of wild lines, weird shapes and odd proportions – is designed to reflect this.
He adds: “We looked at the way we used to draw when we were in high school, when you’re so passionate and you just don’t know how to draw, but you don’t know that you don’t know how to draw yet.
“So you’ll lovingly draw a hand and every fingernail and every wrinkle on the knuckle, but the hand is horribly misshapen. There’s no formal art training to encumber your pure expression.”
Rowe says: “I have not seen characters in animated films look like this before and thought if we could pull this off, it would be really exciting.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem opens in cinemas on Thursday.
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