Although the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phenomenon petered out in the mid-1990s after the disaster of its third live-action movie and the end of its original TV cartoon, plans for another film that would circle back to animation were discussed throughout the early 2000s. At one point, John Woo was even supposed to direct it. When that didn’t happen, the property returned to television instead for a revival on the Fox network’s Saturday morning TV block starting in 2003. Success there then led the way for another theatrical reboot that came to fruition in 2007 under the abbreviated title TMNT.

In addition to the switch back to animation, the TMNT movie also represents a conscious course correction away from the direction the last two live-action entries headed. The fourth film no longer panders so blatantly to very young, grade school viewers. With a slightly darker and edgier tone (but not too much so), the makers of this installment hoped to put the “teenage” back in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Title:	TMNT
Year of Release:	2007
Director:	Kevin Munroe
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Max Paramount+ Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Mind you, “dark” and “gritty” reboots were all the rage at that time, and countless pop culture properties were forced to undergo them, whether appropriate or not. As far as that aspect goes, this one could have been much worse. The entire concept of Ninja Turtles is inherently goofy, and at least some measure of that is retained. The characters still talk in surfer slang, devour mass quantities of pizza, and make wisecracks while fighting. Their core personalities are mostly recognizable. Yet the picture has less dopey humor and the heroes deal with a lot more angst than Turtles fans may have expected.

While TMNT is clearly meant as a reboot in style and tone, the plot could almost be a sequel to the live-action movies anyway. The story picks up some time after the Turtles defeated archenemy Shredder, whose Foot Clan has receded back into the shadows. In the meantime, internal strife has affected the team. Leader Leonardo left New York, ostensibly to train in Central America, but seems to mostly just want to put some space between himself and his brothers. Michelangelo and Donatello have more or less retired from crime-fighting and taken up other odd jobs to keep the pizza flowing. Only Raphael still patrols the streets, now wearing an armor suit and calling himself Nightwatcher.

With no Shredder around, the story this time revolves around billionaire industrialist tycoon Max Winters (voiced by Patrick Stewart), who is secretly a 3,000-year-old Aztec warlord blessed (or cursed) with immortality. In ancient times, the man then-called Yaotl used magic to open a portal into a parallel universe, only to accidentally unleash twelve monsters that destroyed his army and turned his four top generals into stone statues. Using the enormous wealth he amassed over the centuries, Winters manages to revive those generals and tasks them with collecting the monsters (gotta catch ’em all!) so that he may reopen the portal. As this cosmic threat bears down on their city, the Turtles must reunite to stop it. In doing so, they also have to learn how to set aside their differences and become a family again.

Produced as the debut theatrical feature from Imagi Studios, TMNT has slick and stylish computer animation that, if not quite up to the standards of top-tier studios like Pixar or DreamWorks, mostly holds up well for the era. The Turtles themselves look good, and the action scenes have a kinetic virtuosity only possible in animation. Along with Patrick Stewart, other notable names doing voice work include Sarah Michelle Gellar as April, Chris Evans as the Turtles’ pal Casey Jones, and Zhang Ziyi (from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) as the current leader of the Foot Clan. Laurence Fishburne also provides voiceover narration.

I had last watched TMNT shortly after it came out on Blu-ray in 2007 and liked it quite a bit at the time. On this rewatch, I found it less compelling than I remembered, but still mostly enjoyable. The fight scenes are still a lot of fun and the character dynamics offer some unexpected depth for a kids’ movie.

On the other hand, I think much of the dourness and family drama are overplayed. The film’s greatest weakness is that the narrative is needlessly convoluted, and ultimately not terribly interesting. Never is it explained why Yaotl/Winters looks so white and speaks in a British accent, nor how or why all the monsters just happened to turn up in New York City. As much as I appreciate the attempt to bring some complexity to a cartoon about talking turtles who fight monsters, Winters is nowhere near as colorful or memorable an antagonist as Shredder, and I had a difficult time getting invested in the story about him.

Also mildly annoying is that most of the human characters are drawn with exaggerated proportions that look like the doodlings of an actual teenager. Poor April O’Neil has been given the face of a 13-year-old girl, a perky bustline, and a waist the diameter of a nickel to make the character “hot.” Stuff like that hasn’t aged well and I could do without it.

Neither of my sons is sold on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles yet. I managed to convince one to watch this movie with me, and his reaction at the end was an underwhelmed “Meh.” (To be fair, he’s deep into a big Spider-Man phase right now and doesn’t care about much of anything else.) The other one bolted the room as soon as the opening credits came up.

During its release in 2007, TMNT made a respectable profit from its relatively modest budget, but wasn’t nearly the blockbuster its producers or studio hoped for. Afterward, Imagi Studios only ever produced one more theatrical film, the 2009 Astro Boy, which was such a flop the company went bankrupt and never made another movie. Any plans for a TMNT sequel evaporated at that point, and the Ninja Turtles franchise eventually wound up in the hands of Michael Bay, who amped it up for another live-action reboot that came to pass in 2014, to more mixed results.

The Blu-ray

Following its March 2007 run in theaters, Warner Bros. released TMNT on both the Blu-ray and competing HD DVD formats in August of that year. Aside from the case color and format logo, both editions had identical cover art so tacky and ugly I felt compelled to seek out and print a custom cover based on the superior theatrical poster.

In another annoyance, the Blu-ray auto-plays the film without going to a main menu first, but has also been stupidly authored to default to lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 audio even though the disc includes a lossless Dolby TrueHD soundtrack as well. To get the superior audio, you need to bring up the disc menu after the movie’s already started playing and manually switch to it. There was never any need to do this; any Blu-ray player would automatically fall back to the DD 5.1 core during the initial HDMI handshake if the viewer’s equipment weren’t capable of decoding TrueHD. That’s an inherent feature built into the Blu-ray format since its inception. (HD DVD worked similarly.)

The Blu-ray was authored onto a single-layer BD-25 disc, which shouldn’t be an issue for a movie this short, but of course that didn’t stop spec-obsessed format zealots from whining about the bit rate. To be fair, looking at it again more than a decade and a half later, the disc’s 2.40:1 image is surprisingly soft – not terribly so, but just enough to wish it were better resolved. However, I can’t be sure whether that’s really a disc transfer or encoding issue, or simply the nature of the early-2000s computer animation. Likewise, bright highlights in the picture look a little dull and sometimes crushed. Was it always like that? I didn’t see the movie in theaters to know what it looked like there.

Colors look pretty good, though I’m inclined to say that a couple instances of banding artifacts are indeed most likely a disc issue, rather than an animation issue.

As for the audio, the Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track has a lot of zippy surround activity and boomy bass that’s sometimes fun. The voiceover narration by Laurence Fishburne that opens the picture is inexplicably muddy (a recording issue?), and the whole soundtrack in general sounds like the high end was rolled off a little much. The track is mostly satisfying regardless, but I wouldn’t count it among the best audio available on disc.

Bonus features include an audio commentary by the director, some brief alternate and deleted scenes, a couple very short featurettes that don’t amount to anything substantive, and a trailer. All of the video features are limited to standard-definition resolution.

Related

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)