The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are funny action heroes, but they’re still martial arts badasses. They have to take out the bad guys, and that requires violence. Too bad the ratings board won’t allow the best parts of their fights in the new TMNT film.
Animated TMNT Violence
“The biggest enemy is going to be intensity,” said director Kevin Munroe. “It’s not violence. It’s never really glorified. It’s always done with the sort of turtle’s spirit which is cool. It’s not language or blood. It’s sort of just intensity where those fun peaks and valleys come from when you’re telling the story.”
However, the MPAA set a mandate early on that nunchucks to the head will never pass a PG rating. “They still use their weapons, it’s just you’ve got to kinda cut around it. It’s the implication of a lot of stuff. For some reason, it’s a hot button topic with the nunchucks for some reason, but nobody’s really come down about the kitanas. That sort of seems that’s so far out, that it’s not as graspable by kids. You work around it. You push it as much as you can. When you get nailed for it, you try to pull it back a little and still sort of try to maintain what you’re going for.”
Perhaps it’s best for the international marketability of the film. “Nunchucks are absolutely illegal in the UK,” said producer Thom Gray. “You can't even show them being whipped around. You could show them in a belt but you can't show 'em [in use]. And the throwing stars are totally illegal. You get into Germany and Scandanavia and they really say, 'No way, that has to come out.' And you can only positive cut that stuff so it's going to remain to be seen. We had to kind of work around that. It's not going to be that apparent in the fights because there's so much going on and your eyes are not even going to see it. But clearly we were told up front, don't whack anybody over the head with a nunchuck because it's going to come out.”
With animation based in Hong Kong, expect to see some authentic fight animation. “We blocked everything out here so we had the camera setup,” said Munroe. “We certainly knew where it was going and then the animation director would come back and he would say, 'Would you mind if we just opened this shot up just a bit?' I'd be like, 'Give it a shot.' And they would just do this phenomenal move and just adding different fighting styles for all the different characters. We knew we wanted this stuff and I didn't realize just how clearly it would come out, just how very impressive it would look when you see the turtle do the fighting.”
TMNT opens to theatres on March 23rd, 2007.
For posters, banners, movie stills, trailers and more movie info, go to the TMNT
Movie Page.
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