Slow to return, teen Turtles are back! By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY The Chinese calendar says 2007 is the Year of the Pig, but Warner Bros. is hoping to make it the Year of the Turtle. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hollywood's most successful pizza-eating adolescent reptiles, are hoping to make a smashing big-screen comeback in a new computer-animated adventure. The characters made their pop-culture mark in the late 1980s and early '90s with a popular comic book, after-school cartoon, toy line and hit series of live-action movies. The first movie, in 1990, made an astounding $135 million, and the second and third installments collected $79 million and $42 million, respectively. "Turtle power" has faded in recent years, but the characters still have a cult following. Though the previous Ninja Turtles movies were live-action, with martial-arts experts sporting giant rubber suits to play the main characters, the new movie takes them back to their cartoon roots with computerized effects. First-time feature writer/director Kevin Munroe, who has worked previously in video games, comics and TV animation, says he wanted to do total animation instead of simply inserting digital characters in a real world. He said it's easier for the audience to suspend disbelief for such an offbeat story. "This way there's no break in the reality between CG and live-action," Munroe says. "With (total) animation, there's a continuous reality that exists for the whole thing. Your mind opens up a little bit more." Sarah Michelle Gellar (The Grudge, and TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer) has signed on as the voice of April, the human researcher who serves as the Turtles' tech-services worker and mother figure. Fantastic Four's Chris Evans is the hockey-stick-swinging Casey Jones, and Clerks filmmaker Kevin Smith also voices a cameo as a greasy-spoon chef. The Turtles themselves will not have celebrity voices, however. The back story, for those who don't remember, is that a toxic waste spill mutates ordinary turtles into humanoid fighting machines, who are named after Renaissance painters and report to a martial-arts master who is a rat, named Splinter. (Caught up? Good.) The new threat: Max Winters (X-Men's Patrick Stewart), a tech industrialist who is amassing an army of monsters in the city. Picking up where the previous live-action movies left off, Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael reunite to fight him. WATCH THE TRAILER