2007 animated TMNT movie

[JD]

I just watched this earlier today on Netflix and I really enjoyed it.
I had actually first watched a little bit of it years ago, but never got around to watching the whole thing until today.
The voice cast featured a lot of familiar voices from the obvious like Patrick Stewart, Sara Michelle Geller , Zhang Ziyi, and Lawrence Fishburn, to the less famous like James Arnold Taylor (Ratchet & Clank's Ratchet, Star Wars: The Clone Wars & Rebels' Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Nolan North (Uncharted series' Nathan Drake, Young Justice's Superboy). Mako as Splinter was especially great casting IMO. Pretty much the whole cast did a great job.
I do find it kind of ironic that this had the MCU's Captain America, Chris Evans, as Casey Jones, and the new live action movies have the Arrowverse's Green Arrow, Stephen Amell, as Casey.
The story and writing were both pretty good, I liked the fact that it actually spent quite a bit of time on the Turtles and their relationships, rather than just focusing everything on them beating up bad guys.
For a 10 year old movie from one of the smaller studio, I thought it actually had some pretty good animation. It had some pretty good action scenes, with the Leo/Raph fight being especially good. I think it was possibly one of the best fight scenes I've ever seen in this kind of CGI animated movie.

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[Stephen!]

There's an image, from what might have potentially been a sequel to TMNT 2007.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

I remember enjoying it a lot although I haven't seen it since it first came out. It's a shame the original review thread is gone; I would love to read my old review of the film.

 

[Saul]

There's an image, from what might have potentially been a sequel to TMNT 2007.

Woah, where is that from?

I really enjoyed the animated movie. I was disappointed it never got the sequel it was hinting at. The continuity of this film was loosely connected with the first two live action movies if I remember.

 

[Tosk]

Woah, where is that from?

http://peterlairdstmntblog.blogspot.com.au/2008/08/art-no-longer.html

I love the 2007 TMNT movie. For me, it's one of the three best Turtles adaptations out there. (Along with the '90 movie and Nick's 2012 series.)

It's not perfect, but it really focuses on the Turtles in a way that the turd-tastic Bay productions don't. (Which features them more as stereotypes of their major personality traits.) The Leo/Raph dynamic is done really well, although it's a minor bummer that Donnie and Mikey mostly play for the background for the most part. But better to serve some characters well than to split it and give no one anything good to do.

 

[Christopher]

I love the 2007 TMNT movie. For me, it's one of the three best Turtles adaptations out there. (Along with the '90 movie and Nick's 2012 series.)

Yeah, TMNT is probably the best of the feature films (I haven't seen the Bay-produced ones, though). What I find interesting is that it's implicitly a loose sequel to the '90s live-action trilogy, since artifacts from all three films are seen in the Turtles' trophy room, and the story feels like a sequel, in that the characters are a few years older and have a history and accumulated baggage that they're dealing with. Yet it also brings in more elements from the comics, such as Karai, and that and the voice casting remind me of the second animated series that was on the air at the same time. It's like they were trying to capture the best aspects of both the earlier movies and the contemporary cartoon.

 

[DigificWriter]

@Christopher I don't really see how you can define the depiction of specific artifacts that exist only within the continuity of the '90s films in the 2007 animated film as establishing it as a "loose sequel", but "to each their own".

I tried to make it so that the Wikipedia pages for the '90s films and the 2007 film reflected the fact that they're all intended to be part of the same series and was able to temporarily succeed, only to have my changes revoked because one of the 'overseers' changed their mind after having already given me permission to update the pages (which is just frustrating and stupid, like so many other things about Wikipedia).

 

[JD]

So it's not officially a sequel to the live action movies? I had heard it referred to that way so many times I had just assumed it was the official intent all along.

 

[DigificWriter]

So it's not officially a sequel to the live action movies?

It is, at least in terms of intent as defined/driven/established by content.

 

[Christopher]

@Christopher I don't really see how you can define the depiction of specific artifacts that exist only within the continuity of the '90s films in the 2007 animated film as establishing it as a "loose sequel", but "to each their own".

The reappearance of objects from earlier movies is sometimes done just as an in-joke -- for instance, the Oscillation Overthruster prop from Buckaroo Banzai showing up in various Star Trek and other productions, or the TARDIS being snuck into a miniature shot in an episode of Red Dwarf. I do choose to take it as an indication that the movie is meant to be essentially in continuity with the first three, but the movie also takes its own liberties, using the originals as a launching point and revising the character designs, adding new elements from the comics, and generally going for a feel that's derived as much from the comics and animation as from the movies. So it's loose in the sense of its overall presentation and portrayal of the world.

Fans often get so damn literal about in-story continuity, but fiction is not as absolute as reality; something can be both a continuation and a reinterpretation of an earlier work at the same time. The '07 film ceratinly allows the viewer to interpret it as a sequel to the first three movies -- again, I do personally interpret it that way -- but I recognize that it can also be read as a distinct version that uses the prior movies merely as part of its genetic material, in much the same way that the current animated series has drawn on characters and concepts that were formerly unique to the '87 and '03 cartoons and some of the later comics and blended them together into a new reality. The movie allows either reading, which is why there's no consensus.

 

[DigificWriter]

Fans often get so damn literal about in-story continuity, but fiction is not as absolute as reality.

It should be, because if you don't have a coherent sense of overall continuity, you're not doing a good job building your universe.

IOW, whether or not something occupies the same continuity as something else shouldn't be "up for interpretation"; it either IS part of the same continuity as something else or it's not. Plain and simple.

 

[JD]

I don't think it's always that cut and dried though, sometimes things can be a bit ambiguous.

 

[Christopher]

It should be, because if you don't have a coherent sense of overall continuity, you're not doing a good job building your universe.

Objection -- begging the question. What's open to debate is whether the film even is in the same universe as the first three. There are already multiple distinct TMNT universes -- the original Mirage comics, the 1987 TV series, the Archie Adventures comics, the original movie series, Saban's The Next Mutation, the 1996 Image comics, the 2003 animated series, the 2012 animated series, the current IDW comics, the new live-action movies, the Half-Shell Heroes animated special, not to mention the video games and such. All of these are influenced by their predecessors and borrow some elements from them while differing in other respects -- for instance, the Adventures series started out just adapting the TV cartoon but quickly diverged into a very different, more serious and complex universe. The Next Mutation was based on a cancelled fourth movie and continued some of the previous movies' sets and concepts, but it contradicted the movies in certain details, mainly in that the Turtles were not biological brothers in this version. The Image comics started off as a continuation of the Mirage series but were then incorporated into the Image universe, and those issues were subsequently treated as outside the Mirage canon. The Half-Shell Heroes animated special uses the voices, overall situation, and character designs (chibified for the toy line) of the 2012 series, but is out of continuity with it, a variation for a younger audience. So there are not only multiple TMNT continuities, there are multiple examples of different continuities overlapping or being offshoots of each other, sharing many concepts but still being distinct. So it's really disingenuous of you to act as though it's somehow unimaginable for the '07 movie to do the exact same thing.

IOW, whether or not something occupies the same continuity as something else shouldn't be "up for interpretation"; it either IS part of the same continuity as something else or it's not. Plain and simple.

Virtually nothing in reality is that binary, let alone in fiction. Human imagination is complex and resists being forced into such tiny, repressive boxes. Creativity is a continuum. Some works embrace continuity, others ignore it, others are between the two. It's nonsense to use continuity as the only standard of a story's quality. It's just one stylistic tool.

And for the record, every reader of a work of fiction has the absolute right to interpret it in their own way. Writers and artists create their work to encourage people to think, not forbid it. If there were no interpretation of fiction, there would be no literary critics, no scholarly analysis, no online bulletin boards. The whole reason we're here is to discuss and interpret fiction.

 

[Tosk]

IOW, whether or not something occupies the same continuity as something else shouldn't be "up for interpretation"; it either IS part of the same continuity as something else or it's not. Plain and simple.

If that's the case, then 2007 is not in continuity with the '90s film. Splinter has both ears intact in '07.

 

[Gaith]

I remember thinking at the time it was gutsy of the filmmakers to not do a clean reboot and retelling of the Shredder saga, going for an original (I assume) story. Had I had a financial stake in the project, however, I would not have been nearly so impressed with hanging the franchise's first theatrical movie in 14 years on such a flimsy foundation.

 

[Christopher]

If that's the case, then 2007 is not in continuity with the '90s film. Splinter has both ears intact in '07.

Oh, I missed that detail. So that puts in the category of the other things that are almost but not quite in continuity with earlier versions, like the Adventures comics, The Next Mutation, etc.

 

[Stephen!]

So it's not officially a sequel to the live action movies? I had heard it referred to that way so many times I had just assumed it was the official intent all along.

Turtles Forever seems to consider them separate universes.

 

[Christopher]

Turtles Forever seems to consider them separate universes.

I guess you could assume they're adjacent to each other in the multiverse -- very similar but not wholly identical.

 

[DigificWriter]

To clarify what I was saying before, I'm a firm believer in adhering to "authorial intent" in determining whether or not something is directly connected to something else, especially when there is clear indication of what said intent is.

If there's no clear "authorial intent", then I welcome speculation and interpretation, but if there's a clear indication of what an author's intent is, I believe that said intent should be observed and deferred to.

The absence of a torn ear on Splinter in the 2007 film, which is not a detail I was previously aware of, does muddle the question of "authorial intent" with regards to the film's continuity with the ' 90s films more than I had believed.

 

[Captain Craig]

Regardless of where it stands with the live action 90's films I also really enjoyed it and would've liked a sequel. That image at the top is the first I've heard that they went so far as to do some type of promo work up. Oh, what could've been.