previous page
TOC
Features
One Shell of a Good Time Ant Ward and Andy Suriano give us the scoop on their awesome new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
I
f you need some action-packed fun and fantasy and a quartet of pizza-chomping, interplanetary alien-fighting heroes back in your life, then have to feast your eyes on Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie on Netflix this month. Directed by Nickelodeon series veterans Ant Ward and Andy Suriano and penned by Tony Gama-Lobo and Rebecca May, the pic features a killer cast that includes Ben Schwartz, Omar Miller, Brandon Mychal Smith, Josh Brener, Kat Graham, Eric Bauza, Haley Joel Osment, Rhys Darby and John Michael Higgins. The film’s plotline finds our favorite halfshell heroes encountering a mysterious stranger from the future named Casey Jones who warns them about the invasion of Earth from an alien force known as the Krang. Soon, the Turtles find themselves wrapped up in a super energetic and exciting mission to save the world from the soul-sucking aliens.
Two Parallel Tracks Ward and Suriano tell us that they actually started developing the movie back in October of 2018, but things really got moving on the
project in March of 2020. “The entire production was done during the COVID quarantine period,” recalls Ward. “We had about eight months to get the animatic ready and it was a very ambitious schedule.” Ward adds, “When the movie got greenlit, we were deep in telling the stories for season two of the show. The movie was on a definite trajectory. Because the second season was truncated, we couldn’t tell the entire story in the show. There were some things in the movie that are not going to quite align with the series, but we worked around them.” Helping the 90-plus team at Nickelodeon with the Toon Boom Harmony-based animation production were Australia’s Flying Bark as well as Top Draw studio in the Philippines. “They
helped us tell the story we wanted to tell,” says Ward. “We couldn’t have done it without them.” The duo points out that the feature format allowed them to bring nuances and layered character growth to the familiar characters. “We were able to feature a lot of growth for our Turtles, things which we could only do incrementally in a series. We knew we had a longer time with the story, so we were able to take each character on a journey and watch them grow,” says Suriano. “I think it will be a lot of fun for existing ROTMNT fans as they’re going to see some of the seeds that we planted earlier on pay off. Our goal was also to bring in some new fans and make this movie accessible to general Ninja Turtle fans. Some of the general TMNT fans will be able to enjoy
“You can have as much butt-kicking ninja action as you want, but if it doesn’t have heart and soul and some underlying sincerity and truth to it, it falls on the ground.”
www.animationmagazine.net 14
TOC
— Director Ant Ward august 22
previous page
