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Another Super Mario Movie on the Way?

Another Super Mario Movie on the Way?

Recently, Nintendo has mentioned that it is speaking with a few film companies in hopes of creating some animated films based on its properties – and surely Super Mario Bros. is the first of those properties to come to mind. After all these years, I’m glad to hear it. Despite the overly simplistic story and complete lack of character development in the games, seeing such nostalgic and familiar characters on film might be worth it.

The Mario series has never been very plot-heavy. Nintendo has relied on exciting new gameplay and art style to hold up this series, as the story is lackluster at best. That being said, there are certainly quite a few plot holes that will have to be filled once Mario is translated onto the screen. How a lowly plumber knows a princess intimately enough to consistently attend her parties, for example. Or how any of the creatures, like Koopas or Toads, came to live in the same universe as humans (as Mario and Peach appear to be). If they decide to explain these things, I hope they do it better than the embarrassingly awkward way they managed in the 1993 film, Super Mario Bros. .

Portraying the world of the Mario games will also be difficult. Simply put, life isn’t a video game. Even in a cartoon, jumping over obstacles and getting rid of enemies by stomping on them the way you do in a Mario game is extremely unrealistic. Never mind trying to explain the portals to different levels and worlds in Mario . In a game universe, going through a door to a world with a completely different set of rules and physics is as old as video games themselves.

However, Nintendo did mention that they might turn the Mario movie into an anime. Suddenly all of the above can become far more plausible. Knowing Nintendo, a Super Mario anime would be ridiculous, silly, and entirely overdramatic. But it would make sense, more or less. They managed it with Pokemon , after all, explaining away an odd world of little monsters cooped up in balls to be kept for fighting purposes (though I can’t imagine Mario shouting “plumber attack!” would be super-effective). Nonetheless, the world of Mario would be easier in an anime style simply because they are allowed to be so very silly and unrealistic. The very mechanics of what makes an anime an anime can turn Mario into a brooding plumber or a kind of comic relief, like Luffy from One Piece . The world, in all it’s weird wonders, will simply exist – they won’t really have to explain it. To a certain point, of course, logic does still have to follow on Mario’s adventures in my opinion.

Another Super Mario Movie on the Way?

As such, attempting a Western style cartoon would be too difficult because of the requirements of realism that the Mario games simply don’t have. I very much hope Nintendo makes Mario an anime – it’s the easiest way to make it a film worth watching at least once. The world would make sense at least, and the characters might acquire some unknown depth simply by existing inside the tropes of the anime industry. It could even be pretty awesome!

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