All eyes are on The Game Awards 2022, which begin on Thursday, December 8th, and it seems that we will soon be treated to a new teaser for the much awaited Super Mario Bros. Movie. The British Board of Film Classification has classified a new trailer for an animated movie with a run length of 1:30, as noted by Twitter user @dfffaz01.
This is most likely going to be the second or next official trailer for #TheSuperMarioBrosMovie, and it’s presumably intended for The Game Awards next month. BBFC just rated another trailer for the film, and it has a duration of 1:30 (one minute and 30 seconds).
Overanalyzing the first trailer
Well it’s been a hot minute since the release of the first teaser, let’s revisit it and analyse;
The teaser opens on a frozen scene with an aurora borealis-encircled metropolis in the distance. A spiky floating landmass with Bowser’s face releases spike-ball anchors and lands on the ice tundra while drops and streams of lava start pouring from the sky. Here, Bowser seems to be in charge of a little continent that may rise and fall at his command, as opposed to controlling an airship as in Super Mario Odyssey and many previous Mario games. Its towering style is evocative of both Mount Doom in Peter Jackson’s Return of the King and Bowser’s Castle in the Super Mario RPG. Director Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic make it quite apparent that they are portraying Bowser as horrifyingly nasty rather than as amusingly stupid, as he often appears in Mario spin-offs.
Bowser’s wizardly adviser Magikoopa makes an appearance in front of a horde of spear-wielding Koopa Troopas, some of them are carrying banners depicting Bowser’s crest. Bowser advances across a sea of flames and shadows after Magikoopa proclaims the approach of “the king of the Koopas.” One of the Koopa Troopas cowers with its head in its shell as he menacingly stomps toward the cold blue metropolis. This is when Jack Black’s Bowser first appears to us. He yells, “Open the gates,” and the gates open. Black’s portrayal of Bowser sounds suitably terrible and not in the least stupid, displaying a good range for the actor-comedian who is more well known for portraying zany, amusing characters than villains. The sound of English coming from Bowser’s gaping jaws is a little startling considering that much of his voice acting in the games has consisted of wicked laughing.
Although Bowser is a conversational character in various Mario games, his communication is often shown in text boxes and is not voiced. Although seeing Bowser talk could come as a shock, it is clear from the teaser that Black is exerting extra effort to seem believable.
The people of the frozen city are much smaller and cuter than the gates, which are enormous and impressive. Blue penguins, which Mario 64 gamers would recognize, live in this metropolis (perhaps from dropping a baby penguin off a ledge in a moment of sadism). The blue penguins’ monarch, who looks to be a brand-new character created just for the picture, commands his troops to assault. They advance and start throwing snowballs at Bowser and his troops, which only serves to irritate the Koopa King. This is the teaser’s funniest scene since the serious confrontation is undermined by the adorable penguins’ quick lack of resistance. An ice block launched from a cute catapult knocks down one Koopa Troopa, but the army as a whole seems unconcerned. The penguin king asks Bowser whether he would “submit” to them or prepare for another light pelting, suggesting that he believes this onslaught was a perfect success and that it was just “a taste of our anger.”
When Bowser decides not to give up, Magikoopa casts a powerful, bright pink spell that causes the penguins to be lifted up and thrown away like rag dolls. Bowser seems to completely demolish the city of the penguins by exhaling a great quantity of fire onto it. Then, Bowser says, “I finally found it,” implying that he has been searching for this object as part of his nefarious scheme. He is standing in front of a blazing yellow star. The star is probably either a Power Star, a commodity that originally debuted in Super Mario 64 and is required to unlock new levels and eventually defeat Bowser, or a Super Star, which in Mario games offers the player invincibility.
It’s unclear how the movie’s hero will contribute beyond serving as a significant McGuffin, but considering that Bowser often swells to enormous proportions in the games, it could be connected to that cliché in some way.
Bowser’s rhetorical exclamation, “Now who’s going to stop me?!” ushers in Mario’s entrance and the Super Mario theme’s opening chords. The opening scene in the teaser is Mario blasting out of a green pipe, bouncing off one enormous mushroom after another, and then tumbling to the ground in a mountainous, forested region covered with fungus. This seems to be Mario’s spectacular entry into the Mushroom Kingdom, the primary location of the Mario video games. We see Mario’s redesigned appearance for the first time in full when he rises up and stretches a little. The most notable features are Mario’s eyes, which have the glossy (perhaps too genuine) reflectiveness of contemporary CGI figures, and his mustache, which nonetheless maintains its characteristic form while having visible hair strands. His clothing is realistically styled yet also tactile and gently textured.
A fun Mario 64 start screen where players could stretch Mario’s face by grasping and dragging it is suggestive of how Mario is pliable and elastic enough to swap in and out of his more classic design patterns while moving. Overall, this is an intriguing interpretation of the dynamic figure.
Finally, fans get to hear Chris Pratt’s Mario, who sounds like (drum roll) Chris Pratt, as he exhales in wonder at the gorgeous mushroom-filled countryside surrounding him. The outcome is rather unimpressive after much fuss, social media foaming, and needless hoopla about Pratt taking over for longtime Mario voice actor Charles Martinet. Despite Chris Pratt’s earlier hints that his Mario voice will be “unlike anything you’ve heard in the Mario universe before,” it sounds eerily similar to a voice that moviegoers have heard all too often: Pratt’s.
Keegan-Michael Key performs a little bit better as Toad, who makes an abrupt appearance with his characteristic shrieking. Fortunately, Key’s voice acting is far more entertaining and less grating than Toad’s voice usually is in video games. Here, Toad cautions Mario to stay away from a potentially harmful blue mushroom before recognizing his error and observing that the blue mushroom is really “absolutely fine.”
In order to have a better view of the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom, Toad guides Mario over a few mushroom tops. Notably, a faint rainbow and Princess Peach’s castle are seen in the distance. Everything in this photograph is stunning, vibrant, and fresh, like something out of a child’s fantasy. Every frame of the movie is filled with eye-catching scenery and objects, showing that Illumination took special effort to create this world. This is an improvement over the terrible, dystopian Super Mario Bros. adaption from the 1990s. This preview shows a fully developed version of the Mario world that Nintendo fans have already grown to know and love, in contrast to the movie’s attempt to make Mario grim and hideous. The scenario of Mario games is sometimes wholly cartoonish, confounding reason because of their typically lighthearted look.
This makes it difficult to transform the planet into a believable, cinematic setting with any sort of laws or understandable mythology. The settings in the movie do a fantastic job of capturing the feel of the games while also suggesting a big, explorable world that lies beyond, based on what the teaser reveals.
The teaser trailer’s closing scene shows Luigi being pursued by a skeleton army of Dry Bones, the dead but still powerful Koopa Troopas infamous for disintegrating then reassembling themselves after a brief period of time. Charlie Day’s Luigi makes a few nonverbal yells and groans, but not enough for us to understand his act. Luigi flees through a sinister woodland, jumps over deadly lava, and locks himself within what seems to be a stronghold from the Middle Ages to protect himself from the Dry Bones. Could this be the beginning or conclusion of a creepy parody of Luigi’s Mansion or a haunted home in the vein of Super Mario World?
Although it’s too early to tell, the animation in this segment is stunning and is sure to have fans clamoring for more.
