The heroes in a half shell are back — but this time, they’re stranded across the river.
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| TMNT - Chrome Alone 2 - Lost in New Jersey | Paramount Pictures |
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey, directed by Kent Seki, takes the beloved characters out of their comfort zone and drops them into an unlikely setting. Mixing slapstick humor, gritty animation and unexpected heart, the short film follows the turtles as they attempt to navigate the Garden State after a mishap sends them far from their New York roots.
The animated short film’s premise adds a twist of intrigue: When a mysterious toy company exploits the turtles’ newfound fame with the Tubular Tortoise Karate Warriors, the brothers follow the clues to New Jersey, where they stumble upon a shocking discovery.
“We wanted to honor the Ninja Turtles’ history while asking what would happen if we put them somewhere completely unfamiliar,” Seki told Variety. “New Jersey became the perfect backdrop because it’s so close to New York, yet has its own energy and quirks that challenge the turtles in new ways.”
At its core, Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey continues the franchise’s tradition of balancing martial arts action with outlandish comedy. Seki said the tone intentionally recalls the chaotic spirit of 1990s family movies while still appealing to a modern audience.
“I grew up loving both Home Alone and the Ninja Turtles, and this project became a way to smash those influences together,” he said. “The turtles are constantly in survival mode — but here, survival means figuring out the Jersey Turnpike.”
Seki, who has worked across both live action and animation, said directing a TMNT short allowed him to infuse personal touches while respecting the loyal fan base. “Whenever you work with characters as iconic as the turtles, you have to give fans the personalities they love — Leonardo’s discipline, Michelangelo’s humor, Donatello’s tech obsession, Raphael’s temper — but then ask, ‘How do we surprise people?’ For me, the surprise came from the setting and the way we used the animation style to heighten those contrasts.”
The animation combines stylized character design with photorealistic backgrounds, creating a world that feels both heightened and lived in. Seki credits his team of artists with pushing the medium forward: “It was about making the turtles pop against an environment that feels almost too real, so every pizza slice and sewer lid becomes a character in its own right.”
Chrome Alone 2 is already making a bit of history. The film has been selected for Variety’s Pixels and Pencils, becoming the first animated short to be invited to the panel. The program highlights the year’s most innovative animated films, culminating in a directors roundtable discussion.
Though Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey is a short film, Seki hints it may serve as a springboard for more stories that push the turtles into unexpected corners of the world. “I think audiences are hungry for new ways to experience these characters,” he said. “We’ll always love seeing them in New York, but throwing them somewhere unexpected opens the door to new humor, new stakes and new visual possibilities. If people connect with this one, I’d love to keep exploring that.”
With its inventive visuals, offbeat humor and affectionate nods to the franchise’s lore, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey is poised to carve its own place in the turtles’ history — even if it has to take the long way back to New York to get there.
Fans can see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey in theaters from Friday, December 19, where it'll play with The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.
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| TMNT - Chrome Alone 2 - Lost in New Jersey | Paramount Pictures |
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES CHROME ALONE 2: LOST IN NEW JERSEY
Release Date: In Theatres: Dec 19th, 2025
Synopsis: When a mysterious toy company seeks to profit off the turtles’ new hero status, the brothers follow the clues to New Jersey and make a shocking discovery in this all new original short.
Director: Kent Seki
Cast: Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon, Beck Bennett, Zach Woods
Legal: ©2025 Paramount Pictures. All Right Reserved.
From Animation Magazine:
‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey’ Director Unmasks the Half-Shell Heroes’ New Animated Short
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| Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey [Nickelodeon Movies / Point Grey Pictures] |
This article was written for the
January ’26 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 355).
The success of the pizza-loving dudes’ 2024 movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem provided a unique opportunity for its director, Kent Seki, to step into the director’s chair for a new short, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey. (If you’re wondering how you missed Chrome Alone 1, don’t worry — there isn’t one.)
The short finds Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael shopping for a Christmas gift for their mentor, Splinter, when they come across some really shoddy bootleg Turtles toys. They track down the maker of the toys to a New Jersey factory and come face-to-face with Chrome Dome, an AI machine that has incorporated into its identity just about every comic-book origin story under the sun.
Seki had always been a fan of the Turtles franchise. “I collected the comic in 1984,” he says. “I was a huge Frank Miller fan at the time, and I couldn’t believe that somebody was doing a parody of Frank Miller, and I loved that comic.”
Perhaps the most AI-like aspect of the story is the villain’s hilarious backstory, which Seki describes as “the amalgamation of a lot of backstories and the worst version of every backstory.”
But that solution came somewhat late in production, Seki says. “We actually had a different version of it for most of the movie,” he says. “There was a character named Archibald Mirthmaker … who was the toy company founder who created Chrome Dome, first as a computer, almost like he was Steve Jobs. He wore a black turtleneck and glasses, and then he changed and converted into a robot.”
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| Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey [Nickelodeon Movies / Point Grey Pictures] |
Bad Robot!
But something about it wasn’t right, and it was executive producer Ramsay McBean who suggested trying a funnier approach. “What if we made the backstory like as if he was an AI, a robot made it up using AI? And I thought that was a great idea,” Seki says.
Writer Andrew Joustra ran with the idea, with the storyboard artists taking it to another level and art director Garrett Lee incorporating it into the character’s look.
“We were going to do these vector-line graphics for his face, because it was based on old-school video games like Asteroids or Tempest from Atari,” Seki says. “It was Tiffany Lam, the production designer from the feature … We asked her, ‘What do you think of AI art?’ And she said there’s one word that comes to mind: tacky. And that became a driving factor.”
Inspirations included Terry Gilliam’s classic Monty Python cutout animation, modernized with 8-bit graphics like you remember from old Nintendo games. “It was a collective thing that happened, and that’s a great example of how the theme of AI brought us together to make something that was comedic and yet said something about the thing we were talking about,” Seki says.
The look of the short builds off Mutant Mayhem. Seki says they were looking at teenage art — the kind of stuff everyone drew in high school. “That was really driven by the production designer, Yashar Kassai, as well as Tiffany Lam, the art director, and Arthur Fong, the other art director,” he says. “We were building upon that, and in order to build upon that, we had to develop new shaders and tools to do Chrome Dome and to do metallic surfaces.”
“This is, again, that reaction to AI … How do we make the unconventional choice that relies more on the human eye than the computer tool to do what we want it to do?” — Director Kent Seki
Seki was going for a more organic look, relying upon Mikros Animation’s VFX supervisor, Matthieu Rouxel. “He’s like a magician … who came up with methods to make the CG look like a hand-drawn and hand-rendered reflection, with highlights that crawl across the surface of these metal things.”
He also compliments digital matte paint supervisor Arnaud Philippe-Giraux, who came up with the idea of using Grease Pencil in Blender to hand-draw crowds they couldn’t afford to render in CG.
“And this is, again, that reaction to AI,” Seki says. “How do we make the unconventional choice that relies more on the human eye than the computer tool to do what we want it to do?”
Seki says he’s pleased with the final film, which was well received at a recent screening at SCAD. “The main thing for me was [that] we turned it into a celebration of human creativity,” he says. “I think that’s one reason why the short is resonating with so many people.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey plays with Paramount’s The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants in theaters beginning December 19.
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More Nick: ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ Movie Sequel and Paramount+ Series in the Works!
Originally published: October 10, 2025 at 00:28 BST.
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