Watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ First Fight in ‘Mutant Mayhem’ | Anatomy of a Scene

In this sequence from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” the team rallies for its first show of turtle power.

Up to this point in the latest animated take on the popular characters, the turtles have spent their lives in the shadows, afraid of humans. But when they emerge on an outing from the sewers and see a human get her scooter stolen, they try to help retrieve it.

Narrating the sequence, the director Jeff Rowe said that it is “the first time that we get to see them fight or be crime fighters in the way that the Ninja Turtles traditionally are. And we really wanted to make them not good at it upfront.”

The characters bumble around and take blows, but ultimately somewhat find their groove in this scene that uses the animation style itself to illustrate some of the mayhem. The smoke, for instance, is 2-D animation placed on top of the 3-D animation to create a scribbled, hand-drawn quality.

Rowe said his team looked at the work of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, studying animation that involved scratching on the film negative, in an effort to “create something that was chaotic and not traditionally beautiful in the animated sense.”