Kingdom Come

The Super Mario Bros. Movie Let’s-a go! The video game icon gets a faithful big-screen redo.

- By Jordan Farley

Despite decades of innovation and accolades on consoles, Super Mario has long been held up as the poster child of disastrous video game adaptations. The Goomba-stomping plumber and his pals are finally getting their due in Illumination’s animated adaptation from Teen Titans Go! directors Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath. ‘We wanted to make this movie a very authentic Nintendo Super Mario experience,’ says Horvath. ‘From story to visual development to the animation, Nintendo has been with us every step of the way.’

1. PLUMBING GREATER DEPTHS

For all their mechanical creativity, the Super Mario games keep storytelling and characterisation to a minimum – a luxury Jelenic and Horvath didn’t have with the movie. ‘It’s a bit of an origin tale,’ Horvath explains. ‘It’s the story of Mario becoming Super Mario.’ At the outset Mario and his brother Luigi are plumbers in Brooklyn, ‘blue-collar guys… from a family of Italian immigrants’ who make cheesy adverts (see image) and find themselves warped to the Mushroom Kingdom. With no suitable game tales to directly adapt, the filmmakers drew from 40 years of Mario adventures in other ways. ‘When you play the game, if you don’t give up, Mario will succeed,’ Horvath says. ‘So we transferred that player experience from the game to a characteristic that [movie] Mario would have.’

2. VOICE OF REASON