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 |
Update (1/26/26): COWABUNGA! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey is now available to stream on Paramount+, under the Extra Features tab of TMNT: Mutant Mayhem! Get started at ParamountPlus.com.
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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From Polygon:
As Disney bows to AI, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles take a stance against slop
A new TMNT short has a very timely message
Last week, the news hit that Disney has struck a deal with OpenAI, the owners of ChatGPT and Sora, to license over 200 hundred Disney-owned characters for AI-generated videos. As the BBC has reported, industry insiders are worried about what Disney’s $1 billion endorsement of artificial intelligence means for the future of Hollywood, as it's the first major studio to make such a move. Yet, as Mickey Mouse seems content to accelerate AI’s oncoming judgement day, another group of legacy characters are taking a katana-pointed stand in opposition.
The lengthy-titled animated short Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey is a seven-minute theatrical cartoon attached to The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, which releases today in theaters. The short features the same versions of the TMNT that appeared in 2023’s critically-acclaimed, beautifully animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and sees the foursome Christmas shopping for their father, Splinter. (If you’re wondering why the Ninja Turtles can be openly shopping in public, it’s because they saved the city in the 2023 film and became heroes to all of New York.)
As they’re shopping, our heroes see a commercial in a toy store window for “Tubular Tortoise Karate Warriors,” a set of action figures clearly ripping off their newfound in-universe fame, yet with the aesthetics of a bad He-Man knockoff. From there, the Turtles decide to confront the New Jersey-based toy manufacturer, and that’s where the real meaning of Chrome Alone becomes apparent.
As it turns out, Tubular Tortoise Karate Warriors were created by an AI named Chrome Dome (a reimagining of a classic villain) which wants to cash in on the Turtles’ fame without paying them likeness rights. Chrome Dome also recounts its utterly hilarious origin story, which is a combination of the origins of Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, The Lion King, The Lord of the Rings and a few others, employing clear knockoff versions of characters and story points from each.
Being that the short is only seven minutes long, a fight quickly breaks out where Chrome Dome has the upper hand as it can predict all their ninja moves, until the Turtles start to employ some silly originality into their fighting to trip up Chrome Dome’s system and they win (and, for good measure, they blow up the factory). While some of that leans into traditional Turtle-fare, the message throughout is “AI sucks” — something Raphael actually says verbatim — for its unoriginality and the way it steals from real people (or in this case, real mutants).
While the message is very 2025, it’s in keeping with the spirit of the 1980s origins of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Back then, TMNT came out of the 1980s boom of independent black-and-white comics, which was an artist-led reaction to the often poor treatment and inadequate credit given to creators at Marvel and DC. Out of this boom came characters like Usagi Yojimbo and the Flaming Carrot, but the biggest success was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.
When they hit it big though, Eastman and Laird didn’t just take the money and run, they invested in other independent artists. Eastman founded the ill-fated Tundra comics, which sought to give comic creators a space to tell stories and retain ownership of their creations. Meanwhile, Laird founded the Xeric Foundation, which gave publishing grants to independent creators for more than 20 years. Eastman and Laird were also instrumental in the creation of 1988’s The Creator’s Bill of Rights, a document signed by a number of comic industry professionals which sought to award things like profit sharing to creators across the comics industry. Unfortunately, it didn’t make much of a change as Marvel and DC generally continued their practice of cutting creators out of the profits from their creations, no matter how successful they became.
While the message of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey isn’t exactly the same of the Creator’s Bill of Rights, the spirit of it is very close, as the meaning of both is/was to protect original creations from being ripped off, be it from corporate overlords or intellectual property-stealing AI — or in Disney’s case with OpenAI, those two forces joining together. And while the right and wrong here is obvious and the Heroes in a Half-Shell are clearly on the right side, one can’t help but think that, given Disney's capitulation, protecting creators from the encroachment of AI might already be a cause as lost and the Creator’s Bill of Rights.
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From Cinemablend:
The Director Of The Ninja Turtles Short Running With The SpongeBob Movie Explained Why They Went So Obscure With The Villain
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem was met with critical acclaim upon its release in 2023, making it unsurprising when Paramount Pictures greenlit a sequel in early 2024. While we’re still two years away from seeing what’s in store for Mutant Mayhem 2, the good news is these versions of Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael have appearances set on the 2025 movies schedule before it ends. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey will be attached to The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants in a few weeks, and Kent Seki, the director of the short film, shared with CinemaBlend why one of the Turtles’ more obscure villains was selected for this story.
Without going into spoilers, Chrome Alone 2 sees the Turtles going to New Jersey after seeing a commercial advertising the Tubular Tortoise Karate Warriors, i.e. knockoff toys based off them. Upon arriving at the Authentic Imitations Toy Company headquarters in Newark, they run into the robot known as Chrome Dome, voiced by The Office’s Zach Woods. Chrome Dome certainly isn’t on the same popularity level as TMNT baddies like Shredder and Krang, so when I asked Seki why he was a good fit for this short film, he answered:
"I think he's a good fit partly because he is obscure, because a lot of people haven't invested a lot into that character and don't bring their background or their personal baggage with it. I think it was 1987 [that Chrome Dome] was designed and made in the cartoon series. It allowed us to modernize him and his personality in a way that would fit with the times today. And it was Andrew Joustra, the screenwriter's idea to make it Chrome Dome. I think Andrew Joustra is a super Turtles fan, so you can always count on the authenticity from Andrew."
Chrome Dome was introduced in Season 5 of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series as a robotic member of the Foot Clan, and he was later depicted in a few episodes of the 2012 animated series (both of which can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription). So a lot of people will be learning about this villain for the first time when they watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey, but as Kent Seki told me, this worked to the creative team’s advantage since it gave them more freedom to tweak him as they saw fit and not worry about how TMNT fans would react. While Chrome Dome’s “in-person” look hasn’t been revealed yet, this is how he’s presented in the toy commercial mentioned earlier from a Chrome Alone 2 clip released in October.
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| (Image credit: Paramount Pictures) |
Again, I’m not going to spill any details about what happens when Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael cross paths with Zach Woods’ Chrome Dome. However, Seki also said this to me during the interview when I inquired about the one aspect he’s most proud of in this short film:
I think the design of Chromeome is pretty spectacular. That was Woodrow White, who is the character designer from Mutant Mayhem. He came in and designed our Chrome Dome, which is influenced by Radu Molasar from The Keep, Michael Mann's 1983 film, as well as TARS from Interstellar, and the original Chrome Dome design from the 1987 cartoon. And finally, that Patrick Nagle reference in the face using vector graphics like from the arcade games Asteroids or Tempest. I think having all of that combined creates this unique and iconic robot.
The director added that Zach Woods is “unbelievably funny” in the role, so perhaps Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey will actually end up becoming the most recognized version of the character. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that we’ll see him in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem 2. After all, the first movie set the stage for Shredder, the Turtles’ arch-nemesis, to enter the picture.
In any case, check out Chrome Alone 2 on the big screen once The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants comes out on December 19. Mutant Mayhem 2 will follow on September 17, 2027, and it was also announced earlier this week that the new live-action TMNT reboot is set for release on November 17, 2028.
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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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