'Best Ninja Turtles adaptation', 'slightly winded story': what is Ninja Turtles: Teenage Years worth?

They are back. In just over thirty years, the famous Ninja Turtles quartet has appeared on the big screen a dozen times. These multiple, uneven adaptations have sometimes left viewers with a bitter taste. This time, the franchise has entrusted the controls to Jeff Rowe, thirty years old and only one achievement to his credit, to give a facelift to the New York reptiles. The message is clear: Ninja Turtles: Teenage years wants to be part of its time. The story of the adolescence of these turtles raised in the sewers of New York, the film multiplies winks and references to its time. To be accepted and live a "normal" youth in the human world, the four turtles will undertake to fight Superfly, a mysterious criminal who sows terror on the city. The result of this initiatory quest, in cinemas on August 9, seems to have convinced the French press.

“The franchise is already well known to the general public but is being successfully renewed here,” boasts Le Figaro in its review. The animation imagined by Jeff Rowe, halfway between graffiti and pencil strokes, is judged "superb" by our critic, who praises the merits of this film on adolescence, whose formula is "a bit conventional, but generous".

The animation of this new animated film, which follows in the footsteps of the last Spider-man, has won the admiration of critics. “The polished aesthetic film, sometimes reminiscent of stop motion animation, sometimes pencil drawing, is full of references to current cinematographic culture,” greets Caroline Besse in Télérama. Not quite convinced by the writing, the journalist regrets that this story "a bit winded [...] pulls a little on the length".

“The rhythm is furious” boasts Yannick Vély in the columns of Paris Match. Captivated by “the particularly worked graphics” of the film, the critic notes “the concessions at the time” of the scenario, with its “jokes which will quickly be dated”. This does not prevent him from appreciating this family film, according to him, whose “super-villain mutant alone deserves the trip”.

It is "the best adaptation to the cinema of the universe created by the Eastman-Laird tandem", abounds Véronique Cauhapé in the pages of Le Monde . The critics appreciate seeing the turtles presented as "heroic figures firmly rooted in their time" and thus seeing them "cross the threshold of the 21st century". Another form of the film: its graphics, which pay homage to the New York imagination. “The smooth image of 3D has been covered with successive layers. It has been smeared, erased by the intervention of 2D and its untimely pencil strokes, its superimposed drawings. Animation treated as street art.”

In Première, François Léger also notes this transition to a new era for the franchise born in the 20th century. But the film is especially illustrated by “the humorous imprint of its producer”: “Fun, funny and ultra-rhythmic, the story goes at full speed”, he praises. The many “incessant” and “particularly heavy” pop culture references do not prevent, he promises, from savoring this “supercharged adventure on the troubles of adolescence”.