Critics agree that CGI gives Turtles an edge

Stan Beer
Saturday, 24 March 2007 15:08

Your IT - Entertainment

Most people may believe that any movie involving giant turtles with Italian names, skilled in oriental martial arts and speaking with American accents is strictly the domain of children. However, the return of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the big screen after 14 years will evoke memories of fans now in their 20s, 30s and even 40s. Critics are divided on the quality of the story but nearly all agree that the clever use of computer generated imagery (CGI) has added a dimension that was lacking in the three movies made in the 80s and 90s.

Back in the final decades of the last century, the "Turtles" (not the band of the 60s) were considered by their loyal fans to be cool. They were teenage martial artists who thrived on pizza and fought for truth, justice and so on. Incidentally, the mutant turtles were taught kung fu (or is that karate?) by the mutant pet rat of a ninja master!

The original underground comic published by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird was much darker of course. After all, TMNT as they later came to be known (and which is the title of this movie) did inhabit the sewers of Manhattan and originally drank beer.

As often happens when big money takes over and the underground goes mainstream, stories and characters become sanitised and commercialised. The result was a cartoon series and three fairly average movies (fans may not agree) featuring actors wearing rubber turtle suits involving themselves in lots of kung fu battles.

In the new movie, critics agree that CGI has delivered a setting much more faithful to the somber overtones of the original black and white comic book, which itself was intended to be a dark parody of Marvel's X-Men and Daredevil comics. Stories involving scenarios of fantasy, whether it's talking donkeys and ogres or nunchucka wielding turtles tend to work well in a computer animated scenario.

With the level of computer games sophistication and computing horsepower available today, it's far easier to make a believable computer based talking turtle than to dress up a human actor in a ridiculous costume. Thus, the only part of actors remaining in TMNT is their voices.

The movie has been designed to appeal to Turtle fans young and old so while there are the obligatory fight scenes there are no excessive graphic violence or adult themes. While this may be disappointing to fans of the original comic, this is after all an effort to resurrect a franchise and inject it with a new young fan base. Whether high level computer animation is enough to get a new generation of Turtle watchers to yell "Cowabunga!" and order more pizza remains to be seen.