Mike Matei

My TMNT Mario Paint Animation, A Retrospective

Mike Matei: Not long after I posted this article, which details my process of creating a full animated sequence in Mario Paint a year and a half ago, my animation was taken down from YouTube due to a copyright complaint.

From the very beginning, I was aware that my video could be taken down, so I purposely designed the video to be as transformative under Fair Use as I possibly could. Everything was manually drawn by hand using a reference offscreen. There's no way to download images into Mario Paint, nor is there any way to trace anything, and the limitations of Mario Paint actually make it impossible to perfectly recreate the original (the article that follows will explain why in detail). And, a new cover version of the song was recorded specifically for this video. I was under the impression that I was so far ahead of what was required that I would be completely in the clear, and then some.

If the animation I made in Mario Paint doesn't count as transformative, then I'm not sure what even does. What if I had recreated the intro using claymation? What if I had used actors in costumes? What if I just used a recording of me singing the theme song in the shower? Where is the actual line that got crossed?

I want to know what aspects of my video supposedly don't qualify as Fair Use. Hopefully I can manage to get that question answered at least. I'm sure other creators could find the information useful as well.

Anyways, the video got reposted by someone already if you didn't get a chance to watch it. It very well may get deleted again, so save it and if you want and share it on other video players and blogs so half a year of work isn't tossed out a window forever..

Of all the art forms, animation seems to be the one affected by economics the most. Film is another big one for sure, but animation is such an incredibly manual, labor-intensive process that there's a giant disconnect between creative vision and what can actually be reasonably produced, and what can reasonably make money. Since animators are painstakingly creating moving pictures frame by frame, simple creative decisions can multiply into hours, months or even years of extra work. Concessions always have to be made, and the work doesn't always pay off.

In 2016, I used the Super Nintendo game Mario Paint to recreate the intro to the 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon opening. Here is the original video that was taken down. Use the links above to see the animation.

There were a lot of candidates to choose from (Thundercats, X-Men, Ducktales were also high on my list), but I chose TMNT because it seemed to be the most likely to reach a wide audience. I knew from the outset that this was going to be a big undertaking, and it took me roughly 6 months to complete.

The reasons to animate using Mario Paint are probably what you'd figure. Since I'm known as a commentator on retro video games, it was appropriate to use an art tool from a retro games console. There aren't really many other choices that fit the bill, and there's no way I could have used the , being the completely useless art tool that it is that's not even suitable for use by children. Also, there's the element of the masochistic spectacle of one man going through the grueling process animating a full sequence working within such strange limitations. I thought people would be into it, and thankfully a good amount of people were.

Mario Paint was a wonderful toy for its time, and Nintendo was smart enough to add game elements, humor, and quirky flair to the experience instead of just making it a basic electronic art program. But as an art tool, the limitations are numerous. It's very strange in that it's essentially a tool to create pixel art, but offers extremely limited pixel precision (save for the pixel art stamps you can define, which weren't suitable for my project).

The game came bundled with a mouse, but laser mouse technology didn't exist in 1992. The Super Nintendo mouse used a rubber ball that rolled along the mousepad to manipulate rollers inside the unit to move the cursor onscreen. Everything grinds to a halt with this mouse if anything gets dirty, and the mouse is in a constant hurry to get as dirty as it possibly can. People reading this who grew up with Mario Paint will remember the cursor snagging over and over and the constant struggle to keep it clean. This was my life for 6 months.