TMNT: Mutant Mayhem Features A Sneaky Mitchells Vs The Machines Easter Egg [Exclusive]
This article contains minor spoilers for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem."
"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" director Jeff Rowe has a fantastic animation pedigree, having written on "Gravity Falls" and "Disenchantment" as well as co-writing/directing "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" with Mike Rianda. The latter centers on a dysfunctional family fighting against a robot uprising, told from the perspective of teenage filmmaker, Katie Mitchell.
During an interview with /Film's own Ethan Anderton, Rowe confirmed that Katie Mitchell, the budding filmmaker at the center of "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" not only exists in-universe of the new "TMNT" flick but is also a bit of a viral star. At one point in "Mutant Mayhem," April O'Neil (Ayo Edebiri) confesses to the Turtles that one of her most embarrassing moments was when she puked live on camera during the morning announcements at school.
Other kids eventually got their hands on the footage and mixed it into memes, and it quickly spread outside of the recesses of Eastmain High School. One of those memes has a video where April is spewing rainbows out of her mouth with the same animation style as Katie Mitchell's movies. Anderton asked if this was intentional because the similarities are too strong to ignore.
"100 percent, I think we used maybe even the exact same rainbow sound effect for that, but we were just like, 'Yeah, this should feel like the thing,'" says Rowe. "Yeah, it's exactly what we did at 'Mitchells,' let's just make it seem like that." I'm a well-documented superfan of "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" and view Katie Mitchell as one of the best director characters in recent cinema history, so to see her work live on outside of her own movie is an absolute treat. She deserves it. After all, she was nominated for an Oscar!
A new era of reference points
Directors have been making references to their previous films for decades, but animation has been one of the most dominant in the practice. Pixar Studios are notorious for dropping in little Easter eggs in all of their projects, like the "A113" classroom number popping up to honor the California Institute of the Arts where many of the Pixar folks got their start.
But they also have no qualms about referencing their projects, past and future, whenever they can. It's something that fans have become accustomed to, and viewers actively look forward to going on the Easter egg hunt. Some folks might find it cheesy or a little self-congratulatory to shout out their previous work, but considering how difficult it is to get anything made in this business, it's a practice I wholeheartedly endorse.
I love that a filmmaker like Kevin Smith has running gags throughout his View Askew Productions, and I was delighted to see how many canonical references were crammed into "Evil Dead Rise" without ever feeling like a distraction. Jeff Rowe certainly has plenty of memorable characters to choose from (I've got my fingers crossed for a Waddles from "Gravity Falls" appearance) to start littering throughout his future work, but given Katie Mitchell's career as a budding filmmaker, she's always going to be a perfect reference point.