REVIEW: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

The fanboy renaissance manages to reach even higher heights with the new "Super Mario Galaxy Movie." The easter eggs and cameos are back with a vengeance, and in much richer resolution than we'd have thought possible even five years ago.

It's for this kind of thing that the movie will be called "wish fulfillment" for video game nerds, but I personally felt fed as an animation enthusiast. To see such caricatured designs playing on such a vivid, textured playground is a rarity. It's only when you see the bricks of a giant, fairy-tale castle splintering and disintegrating that you feel like this world has weight, consequences, and there is something about that which feels strangely validating. And as with the last movie, as with the Mario universe as a whole, the animated world's command over its own landscape lets you swim between all sorts of exotic and eclectic locales and genres at leisure.

Every single cast member feels like they are having fun here. Perhaps it's because I've already accepted the various celebrity voice actors as the embodiments for each character, which I suppose is itself an accomplishment, but I wasn't exactly watching Peach annihilating Wart's evil entourage on the Vegas planet thinking, "No, Anya! Leave Luis Guzman alone! We need him for Wednesday season 3!" (I will give specific shout-out to Brie Larson in her Mario-verse debut as Rosalina. You wind up wishing the movie had like twice as many scenes with her.) The only moment I actually felt pulled out actually came very early on during Mario's first encounter with Yoshi where I was definitely seeing the Jurassic World connections. And I suppose this is where my issues with the film actually began, but it had little if anything to do with Chris Pratt or Donald Glover.

Yoshi has long been one of my personal favorites. He's literally my avatar on the home screen of my Switch. And seeing him make his debut in a feature film had me excited to see him really take part in this technicolor hero's quest and add to the group dynamic--to prove himself an indispensable asset to the troop.

But he assimilates in with very little resistance or really doing much to change the status quo of the main squad. There are some throwaway lines from Toad about having to share the glow with an adorable dinosaur, but these tease no conflict, reconciliation, or compromise between the two. And with the possible exception of Peach, who gets her own specific itinerary in this film, that's basically true of every character on deck. You feel like you could drop basically any one of them, and the story would remain largely the same.

You can see agonizingly clearly just how close this movie slides by compellingness. Most of the plot escalations just worm in without the intervention of the characters, and it could not have been difficult to draw some tethers. Bowser was already trying to appeal to Mario's better nature to persuade him to let him return to dinosaur-size. Would it have killed the writers to let Mario make a principled gamble? I'm not lamenting that lack of any Hitchcockian twists or Shakespearean double-entendre here. Animated family features have been pulling this kind of thing off for a while with only basic narrative arithmetic.

It's almost like the movie is scared that if it starts doing what movies do and puts Mario through the routine of a standard hero's journey, if he does anything we might not permit if he were at the end of our controller, he will lose his universality and cease to be Mario--and no one will want to buy the new Smash Bros game.

But that's missing the fundamental appeal of the cinematic form. And really, that's what draws us to a Mario movie in the first place when we could all just be playing "Mario Kart" instead.

--The Professor

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