4 out of 5

Directed by: Andy Suriano and Ant Ward

I don’t know that it will be too controversial, given the limit of truly great options, but Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie is the second best TMNT film, after – of course – the original live-action entry. If you count Turtles Forever, perhaps there’s competition, but I’d consider that entry a bit inside baseball; and I’m a fan of the 2007 CGI entry, but there are some really cringey moments there, it’s shakily executed plot aside. 

Which is actually a good starting point: Rise gathers a lot of influences from its animated forebearers, and improves on all of them. Which is not to say that those previous shows are overall better or worse, just that R:tM zeroed in on specifics and combined them all into an ultimate form, even harvesting elements from the Rise series and applying them well. We have a similar top down structure as the 2007 movie, for example – the family structure is tested as the boys must face invaders from beyond – but the CG movie was wholly unable to combine those two story sides, and R:tM makes the segue not only naturally, but is also plotted with a degree of unpredictability, its narratives actually being interesting. We borrow a similar rejiggering of a classic enemy as done in 2012, but – and Rise the series actually did this with its main baddies also – that enemy is legitimately threatening. And from across Fred Wolf and 2K3 are plucked the movie’s “modes” of silly and serious, which, again, Rise the show rather flopped at combining, but here things work hand in hand. 

The animators have also ditched the key frame style of animating except for visual gags where it matters; while the overuse of this on Rise’s series was partially budget, the show also leaned into it too heavily as a kind of random humor styling, and it often just undermined the pacing. Combined with R:tM’s solid direction and design and some quality CG enhancements, I felt like the humor landed, the dialogue – when needed – had weight, and the action was exciting, going very bombastic without it being too much. 

Rise: the Movie learned all the lessons. The show maybe tried too hard to be all things; the film is successfully all things by allowing those things room to function. The voice cast was uniformly excellent, with dimensional writing for each character (save maybe April and Splinter, who don’t have much room in the story), and although the script starts to play really loose with mystic powers and whatnot in the conclusion, with the amped up action completely losing any sense of geography, and rewriting the power dynamics of characters intra-scene… the movie is able to barrel through this stuff by engaging you in the ride up to that point, and thus earning your willingness to strap in and shrug at some nonsense while the spectacle unfolds. 

Rise: the Movie is the show we should have gotten. And maybe would have, with a bit more patience from Nickelodeon. But it’s a pretty rockin’ world in which we got to close this TMNT chapter out on such a high not. Now we just need a physical release…