The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Taking a Step Back from Pixar Metafiction
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is not interested in engaging a mature audience in a reflection on their own mortality. That's....good?
I cannot stress enough how much commitment from the visual artists was poured into every frame of this production. I have never seen the art design and characters from one medium get so carefully and consciously transported into another. With this project and the recently opened theme park, Miyamoto has set out to make the Mushroom Kingdom a place that exists beyond the many disparate games he's produced. It's astounding.
The movie itself is a blast, prioritizing fun over any other emotion. My initial trepidation with Chris Pratt's voice casting was unfounded, as he really created a convincing and charismatic "American Mario" accent, befitting the movie's choice to go with this classic Mario backstory (as opposed to the one told in Yoshi's Island and Partners in Time). I really enjoyed the Brooklyn parts of the movie too, really kind of addressing the plumber concept in a satisfying canon.
Peach gets a huge upgrade for this movie, stepping up as her Smash Bros. incarnation more than her latest Odyssey interpretation. She drives the plot forward, forging ahead as a competent and likable mentor for Mario. Most of the rest of the cast are servicable. While Toad was sort of shoehorned in, Cranky and Donkey Kong are more woven in with some bright stitching. Of course, everyone is singing Jack Black's praises as Bowser and it's one hundred percent deserved. He got the biggest laughs from my audience.
Brian Tyler's musical score is simply amazing. I could simply have listened to this as a radio drama and been transfixed by his clever nods to the entire franchise, including cues for Captain Toad, Luigi's Mansion, and the original Donkey Kong.
I'm being very effusively positive for a three-star movie because I'm seeing people emphasize the plot criticisms, which I agree with, but I do think we're missing the point when we lead with those.
This is not Pixar. It's not even Despicable Me. We have been trained for *decades* to see family animated films as a chimera of "gags for children" and "underlying plot for parents to identify with." Even the ones we collectively dismiss as failures are trying for the Pixar formula.
There is no twist villain in this. There is no overwritten dramatic conflict between the protagonists, although there is a shallow rivalry between Mario and Donkey Kong. This is a simple quest storyline. You find yourself in a different world. You have to save someone you love. You pick up party members along the way. In many ways, this harkens back to the animated films of the early and mid twentieth century, in which adults were meant to sit back and enjoy the spectacle while kids followed along without the sense that there were concepts out of their reach.
Isn't it kind of *nice* to have an adventure that's just focused on being an adventure without straying out of its lane and doing cheap imitations of drama? This movie definitely could have thread the needle better in terms of pacing and character beats, but it erred on the side of showing us as much of this universe as possible and creating satisfying setpieces. When my kid is old enough, I'll be pretty happy to show them this movie while reliving the simple joys of Mario's universe.