When you’re 30 years removed from the originally maligned Super Mario Bros. movie, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make something more in tune with the video game material. Especially when you turn to the promising template of animation to bring the iconography of “Super Mario” to life that live action simply couldn’t.
Over the course of three decades, and repeated attempts at video game adaptations failing to meet the expectations of interactive storytelling, this Illumination creation has a lot going for it. Not only are they a subsection of the historic Universal studios, but many would point to Illumination as those who reshaped the modern exercises of animated storytelling for worse. The Super Mario Bros. Movie directed by Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath is another example of Illumination’s disservice to the medium by masking corporate creation and inflating profit margins through vivid CGI, boring vocal performances, Spotify’s most popular tab, and an unrelenting assault of recognizable iconography.
Discussion around the merits of animated films is constantly shifting. With boundary advancing films such as Into the Spider-verse and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio being the most recent examples of attention, care, and respect for the medium that didn’t cave to current trends. These films tend to make most audiences reevaluate what they should expect from a medium that is typically associated with catering to a demographic that enjoys bright lights, funny creatures, and memorable music. There is certainly room for animated films that can run in the background to please any toddler, but the lack of sincere effort and relative appreciation of the medium they’re trying to adapt is appalling.
Aaron Horvath was one of the directors for WBA’s Teen Titans Go! To the Movies. A movie about Robin’s significance in the DC Comics universe as related to his popularity outside of the studio system. It’s a film that found creative ways to jab at Warner Bros., the legacy of DC Superheroes at the multiplex, and was littered with surprisingly funny easter eggs that comically informed a casual viewer and IP-fueled consumer alike. To walk a thread like that without wavering from the identity of the show and advancing the thematic intent of being a self-aware sideshow act that told a story about Robin is genuinely impressive. The movie was a surprise in terms of quality, but far from a hit. Whereas The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a massive hit, the quality-of-life leaves much to be desired.
The Mario games don’t have much “story”, and they typically shouldn’t. Princess Peach is captured by Bowser and/or alike foes. Mario must jump level to level to collect whatever power-ups grant him the ability to defeat the foes. Mario beats the foes, saves the Princess, and you can rerun through the levels to master it or find hidden treasures you may have missed the first time. Although Mario has never had a layered story akin to something such as Mass Effect or The Last of Us, it is still integral to making a movie work. The story in Super Mario Bros. is fine, but it is hardly anything tangible. It’s a hogwash of multiple Mario properties including, but not limited to: ‘Mario Kart’, ‘Super Smash Bros.’, ‘Donkey Kong’, ‘Super Mario Bros.’, ‘Super Mario’, ‘Super Mario 64’, and ‘New Super Mario Bros.’ All of these games should serve as proper inspiration for a “MARIO” movie, but this film in particular wants to be an adaptation of all of the games before it ever worries about being a proper “MARIO MOVIE”.
You could dilute this movie down to 20-minute increments that solely exist as splashes of familiarity. The connectivity between these splashes are shortcuts that are tossed into the pot to be the most numbing form of narrative movement. Seeing Rainbow Road come to life Mad Max style has all the roots of a promising idea, but the entire sequence feels like it belongs in a different movie because it is catering to the most baby-brained form of ourselves because we recognize the game it’s adapting. This is how the entire movie operates. It is deeply unchallenging (for a series of games that are uniformly challenging) and more concerned with making you smile because you see a familiar character or video game beat than trying to tell an actual story. There is nothing about that that is remotely satisfying. Especially in an age where a quarter of the movies making the most money throughout the year are exactly that.
This is the type of product that Illumination revels in creating. Their 3D animation could pop and glisten with a lot of money banking off the backs of the Minions, but they took all the wrong lessons from Dreamworks and couldn't care less about pushing the limits of animation. Nearly all of their films are filled with the “Now That’s What I Call Music 86” soundtrack, and the pairing of that with a property like Mario is criminal. Brian Tyler’s score is adequate, but like most of the film, registers as a mixed bag of different tunes and notes slightly altered to craft an audible illusion of creativity. The original Mario composer, Koji Kondo, can be likened to the greatest multimedia composers of all-time, and the identity of his work being suffocated beneath the reverbs of any radio station is disheartening. Like most video game adaptations, this falls in line with the others that are led by people who seem to have zero passion for the material they’re adapting.
With how much money The Super Mario Bros. Movie has made (second highest opening weekend ever for an animated film) in an age where The Last of Us has motioned for creatives to turn to TV to adapt these games, the future of video game adaptations feels just as bleak as it ever has been. Super Mario Bros. is the lowest hanging fruit of entertainment imaginable. It is so obvious that it was created in an attempt to market Super Mario Land at Universal Studios Japan (and the planned 2025 launch at Universal Orlando), and the efforts of the film feel just like that. Mindlessly wandering with a droning grin on your face under the towering architecture of mass multimedia manipulation that has no coherent pathway, but a cobweb of maze-like paths to recognizable rooms, rides, gift shops, and mascots.
Video games don’t deserve this treatment. They are a challenging art in and of itself, and this constant degradation by the Hollywood studio system that manipulates the actual merits of the original material as nothing more than a theme park level attraction is awful. Now that it’s come back with the entire medium’s poster child in Mario, it is more apparent than ever that there is no interest in using the inherent challenge of world, level, creature, and three-dimensional design of video games to inform the audience of the artistic strokes of video games. Super Mario and his endless lineage and branches of games isn’t some adolescent dummy primed to be punched up like the punching bag in Super Smash Bros. to the tune of Mr. Blue Sky or No Sleep till Brooklyn. He’s a character that leaves endless room for interpretation in regard to storytelling, but he should never be piled into the junk that has infiltrated these creativity-ridden conglomerates who don’t understand that all of the branches on Mario’s tree are decorated with challenges to our consciousness. Mario is essentially the poster boy for party games, but the mini-games and punishing brawls are far more challenging and respective of user input than this poor excuse for a “movie”.