Image Credits: Photo by Courtesy of Universal Pictures – © Universal Pictures via IMDb
Let me make something clear before I get into this: I was not a huge Mario fan growing up. I was more of a “Call of Duty” and “Madden” kid. I didn’t play any Mario games growing up, the sole exception of “Mario Kart” of course. With that being said, I very much enjoyed the movie and I think the reason for that is because I did not grow up with Mario.
First things first, this movie is gorgeous. The animation in this movie is obviously going to be good, considering the movie was made by Illumination. Every scene in the movie is good on the eyes and can be breathtaking at some points. Every character has a great design and all of the places they go are unique and you can clearly tell when they are on a new planet. Another thing with the animation is that it’s fluid and doesn’t get clumpy or get worse, it stays a consistent smooth animation.
Something that bothered me with this movie was the lack of screen time for certain characters. Princess Rosalina who was very anticipated for this movie and who most people were excited to see doesn’t get the most screen time, which was a bummer since she was a new character they introduced and her introduction was incredible. Some characters like Luigi and Toad didn’t have much to do in this movie and it showed. While Princess Peach, Mario, Bowser, Bowser Jr. and Yoshi were the main characters of this film, in my opinion Princess Peach was by far the best character in the movie.
A lot of the heat this movie is getting is because of certain decisions this movie makes. This movie makes a lot of things canon in the movie universe that were the complete opposite in the games and their universe. They change a character’s backstory and make it something completely different, and people have said that the decision ruined her character and more people can’t relate to that certain character anymore because they related so much with the original backstory.
I interviewed Professor Waddell who is currently teaching a class on Games Culture and Theory that I am currently taking. She is very much into video games and has a huge amount of knowledge of video games and when asked if she liked the movie she said, “I did, I liked it better than the first Mario movie. I think they did a really good job incorporating all of the Mario movies into it. I saw a bad guy from Mario 2, they incorporated a lot of the Mario from the Switch games, I mean it’s based on Mario Galaxy, and I thought they did a really good job with that. I was really impressed with the music too.” Coming from her, I found it odd how a lot of people didn’t like the movie because it didn’t resonate with the Mario fans and yet it included lots of Mario references from different games.
I also asked Dr. Waddell if “Luigi’s Mansion” or “Mario Kart” could be a good third movie for the franchise and she said, “‘Luigi’s Mansion’ absolutely could be a separate movie. That movie has a full plot and could be very well developed.” For “Mario Kart,” “I don’t think so. There’s not really a story there. You just kind of drive around.”
In my opinion I think doing something like “Cars 2” did with racing could be a great plot for a “Mario Kart” movie and would make so much money. I think everyone would love it. Just keep the spy plot out of it.
Jackson Evans is a fourth-year Communications major with a minor in Journalism. [email protected]
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source wcuquad.com ’
