Oh, it’s fine.
Universal and Nintendo’s animated collaboration brings the venerable Super Mario Bros videogame series to cinemas for the first time since 1993’s abortive live-action effort starring Bob Hoskins. Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (Teen Titans Go) the film presents a mish-mash of popular characters and situations drawn from Nintendo’s long-running franchise of games, animated by Chris Meledandri’s hugely successful studio Illumination (Despicable Me). The film has certainly struck a cord with a mass audience, since its grossed more than half a billion in its first two weeks. The critical response has been less enthusiastic, of course. It is easy to dismiss the critics, since The Super Mario Bros Movie is clearly not made for an adult audience. Going by the pre-teen viewers with whom I watched the film today, it is hitting its target pretty well. Familiar characters behave in familiar ways, and there is a pleasing consistency in watching Mario jump between platforms, Donkey Kong throw barrels, and Luigi cower in fear in a haunted mansion. Bottom line? If you’re a kid who spends half your time on a Nintendo Switch and the other half watching cartoons, there is plenty in Super Mario Bros to satisfy. If you’re the parent of such a kid, who are you to tell them what they should and shouldn’t be enjoying?
Ultimately, however, is it fair to dismiss critical opinion? On the one hand there is a tendency for many film reviewers, critics, and academics to either ignore or underrate children’s cinema. On the other, some of the very best feature films ever made were produced with children in mind. The Super Mario Bros Movie is bright and colourful, wonderfully animated, and amusing in fits and starts, and a perfectly reasonable way to spend 90 minutes entertaining a child during school holiday time. Does it stand up against a children’s classic like The Wizard of Oz, The Dark Crystal, The Lion King, or My Neighbor Totoro? Of course not, but then again how many films do?
As might be expected – mainly because this is almost always the case – the faults lie in the screenplay. It is credited to Matthew Fogel, although like most animated features the storyline was almost certainly developed by committee. It does not adapt an existing story so much as a style and a character set. Mario is one of the most lucrative and widely-known pieces of intellectual property from the past half century, but what actually created his success was innovative gameplay, and not plot or character. There is a pleasing simplicity to Nintendo’s characters, and a valuable superficiality that removes a need to explain a human princess being kidnapped from mushroom people by a fire breathing lizard and a pack of anthropomorphic turtles.
So how do you explain it in a narrative feature? Two choices are clear: either warp the existing characters into a narrative and world that makes some kind of internal sense, or warp a narrative and world to accommodate a disparate set of characters. The 1993 Super Mario Bros movie, which was directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, definitely took the former approach and that partially led to its commercial failure (the other part being that it is so jaw-droppingly poor that some film enthusiasts are actively trying to bestow it with cult status). Horvath and Jelenic’s take goes the opposite way, and is perfectly satisfied to take the shortest, most superficial routes to justify its string of videogame tribute sequences.
There is a third option: a much more complicated middle route that carefully stitches together disparate elements and instills them with depth and heart. In 1979 James Frawley’s The Muppet Movie managed to take popular variety/sketch series The Muppet Show and establish them for the first time in a real world context. It not only honoured the anarchic humour of the Muppet characters, but successfully wove them into a three-act narrative for the first time and gave them an emotional resonance that their TV escapades never required. Entirely by coincidence I recently rewatched this film, and was struck all over again by just how effectively its key elements were adjusted to shift from one media to another. The care taken in its development and production is why The Muppet Movie is still a five-star masterpiece, and The Super Mario Bros Movie is at best a three-star diversion.
There is clearly a mass audience for whom Mario works, and honestly good for them, and I suspect it works via a pleasing recognition of and nostalgia for the original videogames. When Mario runs along a two-dimensional obstacle course it has a pleasing effect because it reminds us of how great the original Super Mario Bros and its sequel games were. When an army of Koopas descend on the heroes in a frantic kart chase, it reminds us of the fun we have had played against one another in Super Mario Kart, Mario Kart 64, and their various follow-ups. This carefully engineered nostalgia is emphasised by Brian Tyler’s loud, emphatic score that cribs relentlessly (thankfully with on-screen credit) from original games composer Koji Kondo. As a creative work the movie honestly disappoints; it fact it positively flounders. As a carefully engineered piece of corporate IP it is difficult to fault. It is so bright, so energetic, and so completely and cynically manufactured.
The difference between art and commerce is vividly clear in the film’s English language voice cast, which includes Jack Black, Anya Taylor-Joy, and – most divisively – Chris Pratt as the titular Mario. To be clear, no one sounds bad or distracting, but at the same time no one particularly stands out. They have been cast for their names and prestige rather than their talent. They are a dot point on a middle manager’s marketing summary, designed to hook an audience quadrant in to giving the film a chance. The emphasis in casting is not on what works, but what sells.
To be completely honest, it’s not the film itself that disappoints me, but rather Nintendo’s co-production of it. For the past 50 years or so Nintendo has been among the highest echelons of videogame design. Its reputation for quality has been the result of rigorous quality standards. The company has a well-earned reputation for delaying releases until they are in the best possible shape they are in, based on designer (and Mario creator) Shigeru Miyamoto’s oft-quoted claim that ‘a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad’. When Morton and Jankel’s Super Mario film failed, Nintendo famously pulled any chance of Hollywood adapting their properties on an indefinite basis. That this new attempt even exists is down to a personal encounter between Miyamoto and Meledandri, and their mutual agreement to take another crack at Mario on the big screen. Their end result is certainly more competent, but given the standards of Nintendo the gaming company competent really should be exceptional. Nintendo design and release some of the highest quality games in the world. Given they are listed alongside Universal Pictures on this film, and Miyamoto is a credited producer (not executive or associate – an actual on-the-ground producer), it is on Nintendo’s brand that the film should be just as good.
Given the commercial success here, it’s as good as certain that we will be seeing spin-offs and sequels for many years to come, not to mention similar attempts at The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Nintendo’s other key franchises. It seems equally inevitable that they will be very successful and, to put in plainly, not very interesting.
FictionMachine. 
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