New-look ninja turtles

A digital and divisive redesign of the iconic comic book characters has left some fans shell-shocked, but the creators say the humanlike faces are a step forward, Derrik J. Lang reports from San Francisco.

Over the past two years, inside the high-tech sanctuary of Industrial Light and Magic, the man who built a virtual virgin jungle for the last Indiana Jones movie and conjured 150-foot-tall aliens for War of the Worlds has been confronting his most difficult task yet: creating a digital version of the beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that could realistically interact on screen with Megan Fox.

On this assignment, Pablo Helman needed more than just turtle power.