Jeff Rowe makes cartoons that look like they were drawn during a lesson and sound like the back row of the bus. The teenagers are real, the drawings are deliberately unfinished, and the plots come off a shelf. The first two outweigh the third.
Fi1m perspective
Four turtles sit on a rooftop at night and stare at a high school they are not allowed to attend. They talk over one another, lose the thread, get it back. The lines have the untidiness of people who have not yet learned to wait their turn, because Rowe cast actual teenagers and let them improvise, and the picture around them looks as though someone doodled it in the back of a maths book. That rooftop in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) is Rowe's cinema in one shot: children who sound like children, drawn by hand on top of a computer.
He learned the first half of that in a writers' room. Rowe wrote for Gravity Falls between 2014 and 2016, in a room that let its children be selfish, wrong and occasionally cruel, and then let them notice, and whose jokes were about character rather than noise. He moved on to Disenchantment (2018), then co-directed and co-wrote The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) with Mike Rianda, another Gravity Falls alumnus, where the sketch lines first began to show through the CG. Mutant Mayhem was the first film with his name alone above the direction, and it is the one where his habits are easiest to see.
What works is the surface and the voices. Rowe would rather a frame looked scribbled than finished, and he asks his artists to leave the pencil in, so the turtles' New York has the energy of a jotter rather than a showroom. We laughed, out loud and more than once, at how the four of them interrupt and correct each other, and we laughed because it was recognisable: nobody in a Rowe film speaks in the clean, sanded sentences that animation usually gives its young. The word teenage had sat at the front of that title for nearly forty years before anyone took it seriously.
What does not work is underneath. Five people share the Mutant Mayhem screenplay, Dan Hernandez, Rowe, Seth Rogen, Benji Samit and Evan Goldberg, and between them they produced the standard story: outsiders want to be accepted, a villain wants the opposite, and you could recite the rest in advance. The pop-culture references will not all be funny in five years, and a few were not funny in 2023. The consensus on Rowe is almost entirely warm, and we share most of it. Our reservation is that so far the drawing is his and the story is borrowed.
A second turtles film is in the works. Rowe has said of his own method, "Never squint. Never look at something and be like: 'I guess this works.'" He has held to that with the pictures. The next job is to hold to it with the plot.
Biography
Jeff Rowe is an American writer and director of animated films and television series. He grew up in Hometown, Illinois, and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011. He worked at animation studios including Film Roman and Bento Box Entertainment before writing for the Disney series Gravity Falls (2012) and the Netflix series Disenchantment (2018).
Rowe co-directed and co-wrote The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) with Mike Rianda. He directed and co-wrote Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023). In 2024 he signed a multi-year first-look deal with Paramount Animation.
