TMNT: The Difference Between “For Kids” and “All Ages”
Posted by: Guy LeCharles Gonzalez on April 2, 2007 at 11:57 am
The Gonzalez Clan caught a late-morning showing of TMNT on Saturday — my 6-year old’s choice, beating out The Last Mimzy and Meet the Robinsons — and while it did an efficient job of working its target demographic, there’s a good reason it dropped 62% at the box office in its second weekend: it’s not very good.
It doesn’t outright suck, either, which might have been better, giving it some MSTK 3000 appeal. Instead, it’s just another dumb, loud and obnoxious Saturday morning cartoon, with a handful of solid character moments and a couple of good fight scenes that are buried underneath a thick layer of been-there, done-that mediocrity. Had Kevin Munroe focused a bit more attention to the primary relationships and a bit less on the overwrought plot involving extra-dimensional portals and world domination, the whole thing might have been a less messy affair.
Like so many failed comic book translations, there’s a potentially good movie in there somewhere, though I suspect the next installment will be direct-to-video, if it happens at all. My son mostly enjoyed it, and my 4-year old daughter tolerated it for about an hour before turning to her LeapPad. One of the more effective scenes, the fight between Leonardo and Raphael, did have her anxiously hiding her face, sensing the emotional tension therein, and I wish there had been a bit more of that throughout the movie.
TMNT perfectly illustrates the difference between a cynical marketing promotion made “for kids” and a legitimate movie made for “all ages”, best evidenced by Pixar’s slate of excellent movies, each of which I can watch multiple times, with or without my kids, and enjoy. Pixar movies have an underlying reason for exisiting that goes beyond market share and licensing potential, featuring three-dimensional characters, appealing storylines and top-notch animation and voicework.
A couple of other studios have lucked into similarly strong efforts — ie: Ice Age, Robots, Shrek and Happy Feet — but for the most part, computer-animated movies still have an “easy cash-grab” feel to them, a misguided notion the box office has hopefully started to disabuse Hollywood of.
3 Responses to "TMNT: The Difference Between “For Kids” and “All Ages”"
1 | Kayode Kendall
I thought the character moments balanced out fairly well with the plot. Especially the interactions between Raphael and Leonardo. I thought the way they handled Winters, as predictable as it may have been, was still pretty good, making him a sympathetic character who genuinely felt guilty about the things he had done and was trying to fix it. Not to mention the subtle interactions between Casey and April, who are clearly living together in the film with indication of being married. I also think there were some great moments between Raphael and Splinter, illustrating their father/son relationship. If anything, I thought there were moments where they stressed it moreso than the original live-action movies.
And it’s a little unfair to cite its drop at the box office and blame it solely on the quality of the film, when it faced competition from another CG-animated family film (from Disney, no less) AND a Will Ferrell comedy.
There were several good moments, but there was no coherent thread to hold them together because Munroe’s script was all over the place. You simply can’t cover that many sub-plots in an 87-minute movie, and because they were aiming for kids and not all ages, he had to stay close to the 90-minute mark.
Pixar movies are always tightly focused, and it’s only been the last few that have strayed beyond the 90-minute mark, edging closer to the 2-hour range that makes it tougher to hold kids’ attention. They can do that, though, because their movies are good, typically driven more by creative impulse than by marketing licenses. (Though they’re not too shabby there, either!)
As for the box office, if TMNT had generated solid — hell, even decent — word of mouth, it could have held up better against the Disney release (not Pixar, mind you, Disney, whose CGI track record isn’t very good). A 62% drop for an aggressively marketed movie like TMNT is absolutely disastrous, and considering its solid opening weekend, is definitely a reflection of its quality and negative word of mouth.
Will Ferrell’s targeting a completely different audience, BTW, one more likely to be choosing between it and 300 or Wild Hogs than TMNT.
(Side note: I never saw the original movies and am judging TMNT solely on its own merits.)
3 | Kayode Kendall
“(Side note: I never saw the original movies and am judging TMNT solely on its own merits.) ”
What kinda comic book fan are you?!?! LOL!
It just seems like your argument is more the plot went in too many directions, not that it was too focused on catering to kids. Because if anything, it really caters to fans of the old movie (that you’ve never seen), which came out a a good 17 years ago (god, I’m so old!). A lot of references are made to the original live-action film, not to mention certain jokes only adults would get, Donatello arguing with one guy over the phone about his tech support line “not being that kind of phone line”. Even a subtle reference to phone sex is something only an adult’s going to appreciate, ’cause it’s all about internet porn these days.
