Voicing Mario in the Super Mario Bros. Movie is an impossible task

Before we rush to criticize Chris Pratt for giving Mario what sounds like his regular speaking voice — or Super Mario Bros. Movie’s producers for employing him — we should stop and think: What would we have done? Do we really want to listen to a whole film of Charles Martinet going “woohoo” in falsetto and putting on a cartoonishly thick Italian accent? It’s not possible. What would you replace it with?

Both the actor and producers are stuck in tough spots. Mario is an icon. He’s one of most recognized characters in history. He’s the one who made the movie possible. But he is also its biggest problem, because he’s a cipher. Except for being Italian and a plumber, his character traits are very limited. His dialogue is rare. His games rarely have any storylines. He’s a bit of a daredevil, I guess? It seems like he is always having fun. He does a lot of jumping? He was known as Jumpman before he was named Mario. That says a lot. To allow Mario to act in a film, it was going to have to be necessary that he is reimagined.

This is not to denigrate Shigeru Miyamoto’s creation. He tried to imagine a character which would be animated clearly within the tiny pixels of his original. Donkey KongAn arcade game gave birth to something irreplaceable: The red and blue overalls that allowed you to see his arms move, as well as the overcoat so it was easy for the eyes to see through the sleeves, the mustache, big nose and the hat. There’s more than just necessity being the mother of invention here, too, as Miyamoto’s playfulness and gentle, impish subversion come into play. The hero is adorable but uncool, coded as both a toddler or a boring adult, and looks nothing like him.

Mario is, above all else, fun to play with. This is not a Solid Snake or Bayonetta situation — nobody wants to Be Mario (I certainly don’t buy that Chris Pratt did). Mario can be managed. From the NES Super Mario Bros.Onwards, the funny character transforms into an amazing ballet dancer, athlete and clown, with incredible grace and speed. The leaps he makes are impossible; he jumps, skips, bounces, bellyflops, and somersaults.

When Miyamoto’s team was prototyping Mario 64, the character’s first game in 3D, they started with Mario represented by a featureless cube, and didn’t start animating him until the cube was inherently fun to control on its own. In your hands, the character is only alive. The link between player and Mario is powerfully deep, but it’s deliberately not total: His careening momentum has just a hint of chaos to it, a sense that he could slip beyond the edge of your control at any moment. That’s what gives Mario a life of his own — and it’s nothing you can put in a movie script.

Mario might have struggled to write narrative art. This is unless Mario includes his story-minded games such as the amazing Mario & Luigi series). After a series of rather boring cartoons in late 1980s/early 1990s, as well as the notorious misfire of 1993 Bob Hoskins staring Super Mario Bros. Mario stories have rarely been told on film. It is rare to find a crossover medium that has not been used for at least 30 years in a person of such immense fame.

There’s a telling comparison to be made with Mario’s old rival, Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic was barely fleshed-out in his initial game appearances. Sonic can jump far faster than Mario, and Sonic can run fast. Sonic doesn’t have much beyond a move set and color scheme. Sonic, however, has the cool shoes and the attitudeHe crosses his arms as if to stare at you. The tiny and provocative little bit of his personality served as the germ for many comics, animations, fan fiction, and eventually, successful films. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Mario was never able to do the same.

To Super Mario Bros. Movie to work, Nintendo, animation studio Illumination, and Pratt need to find a way to fill this void without jarring with the things about Mario that we feel we do know, and that we’ve been clinging to for decades. It’s an incredibly difficult task, and it’s about much more than a voice, or an accent, although it has to start there. As if that weren’t enough, the Mario of this film will somehow need to ground the audience in the intensely surreal, nonsensical world of the Mushroom Kingdom (which would explain why, in the trailer, he appears to be a surprised visitor there, rather than an inhabitant).

Pratt’s portrayal of Emmet is so bad that you start to see why producers may choose to use the actor who played Emmet in Lego Movies to anchor the film. That the first footage featured so little of Pratt’s performance and Mario’s dialogue could be a worrying sign — or it could just be that Illumination and Nintendo feel the need to introduce us to their necessary reinvention of the character gently.

Like the trailer, the wonderfully evocative posterIt is clear that the Mario movie has a lot more to offer than just its main reason for being made. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much if Mario himself is the one element that ends up lost in translation. It wouldn’t be the first time.