All hail Seth Rogen for making the first big screen version of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” that doesn’t suck. Yeah, the “Sausage Party/Superbad/Pineapple Express” dude.

The “Turtles” have always been the most juvenile among comic book adaptations, one of things working against any adult’s appreciation of the endless TV and movie incarnations of the franchise. But Mr. “Adult Language/Stoner Sensibility” and his partner in co-writing crime, Evan Golberg, preserve that innocence with an adaptation that is jaunty, juvenile, frenetic and fun.

Their brand is “rude,” and they somehow manage to get a PG-rated kids’ cartoon comedy to fit that aesthetic.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” is also a down-and-almost-dirty, impressionistically gritty and aurally and visually rambunctious picture thanks to the artistry of “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” co-directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears.

They achieve this by using a dazzling clash of animation styles reminiscent of the “Spider-Verse” films, but here more aesthetically-coherent and logical. A teen turtle visualizes something in a flashback? Of course he’d dream it in crayon.

And the entire team — Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit are co-writers — cast this for maximum laughs and comical shock-and-awe value.

Jackie Chan lands every-one liner as Splinter, “Dad” to the turtles, and sensei. Ice Cube comically fumes, berates, insults and intimidates as the mutant villain Superfly. Giancarlo Esposito impresses as the lonely -to-the-point-of-“mad” scientist who created the “ooze” that created the turtles, and mutant wild boar (Rogen) and rhino (John Cena) and gator (Rose Byrne), with Post Malone, Hannibal Burress, Natasia Demetriou and Paul Rudd thrown in for mutant-good-measure. Maya Rudolph dons Eastern European accent, dollink, to vamp through the mad corporate scientist who wants to “milk” the mutants.

The story is comic book childish in its simplicity — the underground, outcast “mutant” turtles raised in ninjutsu by a wizened rat (who uses old martial arts films and youtube tutorials to learn it himself) are forced to face other mutant vermin — fly and bat and gecko, etc. — who want to end the human race. But the execution is dazzling and kid-friendly.

Scene after scene has the “teens” bickering and bantering all at once, showing off and acting impulsively. But the “personalities” pop through. There’s the would-be leader turtle named after the Italian master (painter) Leonardo (voiced by Nicolas Cantu), rash, comical “go LOUD” hothead Raphael (Brady Noon), the bespectacled “brains” of the quartet Donatello (Micah Abbey) and the would-be stand-up comic Michelangelo (Shamon Brown, Jr.).

Ayo Edebiri of TV’s “The Bear” plays the aspiring journalist teen April who befriends the “brothers.”

They’re all cast young because the production team remembers these are supposed to be sheltered kids, with childish problem-solving skills but mad ninja “skillz.” They have childish tastes — pizza — childish habits, like sneaking out and sneaking around on human-hating/human-fearing “Dad,” hiding on a roof to watch a New York park screening of Matthew Broderick leading Chicago in “Danke Shoen” in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

And they have the aspirations of outcast children, to “fit in,” be “accepted” in our world, and often-unfriendly New York.

“Maybe one day everybody’ll love us like Ferris Bueller!”

“TMNT: Mutant Mayhem” is, like most comic book/’80s TV kids’ show adaptations, aimed largely at adults who grew up with them. You hear this in the history of hip hop soundtrack, the Gen X casting (40-to-50somethings) and “Family Guy” references. But with the teens chattering about Adele, BTS and the like, they’re reaching out to a younger generation or two as well.

The film’s visual aesthetic — New York as the 1920s impressionists/expressionists/surrealists imagined it, only with mutants — kind of crosses generational lines, too. It has some of the same virtues, with more jokes, and some of the same drawbacks of the “Spider-Verse” animations. It can be visually-wearing, thanks to whirl of images and action the darkness of it all.

But the CGI-processed stop-motion (clay models animation,) briskly sketched-in backdrops, neon-lurid street scenes and action that passes in an animatcan be expressionistically lovely.

And yes, we see segments animated from crayon drawings, which captures the playfulness of this adaptation. That comes through in the characters, the “vomit” and “ooze” and icky-stuff jokes, and in the film’s funniest running gag, aged, human-mistrusting Splinter’s fear that humans will “milk” them if they’re ever caught.

“Milk us? We don’t even have nipples!”

Rating: PG, mild profanity, animated mayhem

Cast: The voices of Jackie Chan, Maya Rudolph and Ice Cube, with Nicolas Cantu, Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown, Jr. and Brady Noon as the Turtles, Ayo Edebiri, and featuring Rose Byrne, Seth Rogen, Natasia Charlotte Demetriou, Giancarlo Esposito, Hannibal Burress, John Cena and “introducing” Paul Rudd.

Credits: Directed by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears, scripted by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, based on the comic book characters of Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman.
Ayo Edebiri A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:39