Let's-a go!
I'm not sure that 1986 is the literal earliest year it's even possible to conceive of such a thing as a feature film adaptation of a video game (the Pac-Man television series was already four years old at that point, and if you can make a television series based on a video game, you can at least conceive of a full-length film), but it's pretty damn early in the life cycle of the medium. And it is, as a matter of fact, the year that the first film adaptation of a video game came out, in the form of Super Mario Brothers: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! (it can be watched in a freakishly good fan-driven restoration - in 4K no less! - here). Which, at 61 minutes, is both significantly testing our generosity around the term "feature film", and also running past the amount of narrative content that the Super Mario Bros. franchise had to offer by 1986. And yet, this was indeed released to theaters, as part of an enormous multi-media promotional blitz around Super Mario Bros. in the summer of '86, with everything from picture books to cups of instant ramen* coming out with Mario's face plastered on it, with the centerpiece of it all surely being the release of the smash hit video game Super Mario Bros. 2†, which came out some six weeks prior to the movie.
If this makes it sound like The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach is a greedy little cash-in, that's for the extremely good reason that this is precisely what it was. Nintendo had suddenly found itself at the white-hot center of a wildly popular new medium that, as far as anybody knew, was going to prove to be a fad with a limited shelf life. Decades later, with Mario having firmly established himself as one of the most immediately recognisable characters in all of global pop culture, this can be hard to keep in mind, but it explains a lot of the choices that got made around video game marketing in the 1980s. And, accordingly, the film we now have in front of us, all 61 minutes of it, was designed to be quick and cheap to crank out, racing its way into theaters and back out so it could land on home video while the market was still there for it.
I won't go so far as to say that it transcends all of that - clearly, it does not - but it's a whole lot more interesting and even artistically accomplished than anything I've said thus far would indicate. The creative team wasn't without some pedigree: the director, Hata Masami, was one of the people substantially involved in getting Sanrio's animation division off the ground, to some measure of acclaim, and he'd later be tapped to direct the Japanese side of the benighted trans-Pacific production of 1989's Little Nemo (which I don't think is very many people's idea of an animation classic, but it was a fairly prestigious, well-heeled production); the animation director, Matsuyama Maya, had worked under the legendary, industry-defining Osamu Tezuka; the writer, Takayashiki Hideo, had worked for a time on Lupin III: Part II. Between them, they made sure that The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach was at least credible as a work of animation and design; indeed, I was definitely expecting something much more sloppy and chintzy than this. The nature of very nearly all Japanese animation prior to the mid-'80s was to use relatively low frame-rates and focus more on character poses and expressions than on expressive movement per se; limited animation, to use a Western term that I'm not certain is strictly appropriate to use in this context, and the only reason it changed a little in the 1990s and then a lot in the 21st Century is because the great Miyazaki Hayao openly disliked the form, and his enormous personal gravity helped to shift the entire industry. Miyazaki's taste's notwithstanding, Japanese limited animation never had the same whiff of "this is low-quality crap for television" it had in the West, and was treated as a rich, expressive artform in its own right, enabling such things as the highly distinctive character designs and famously detailed and sumptuous backgrounds used in so much Japanese animation. Imagine my surprise, then, when The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach - which, to recap, was a made-on-the-cheap piece of junk trying to cash on a fad for children - turned out to have quite a remarkable amount of rather involved, lively, comically playful full animation. The main characters, grocer brothers-turned-heroic adventurers Mario (Furuya Toru) and Luigi (Mizushima Yu), react to the weird, psychedelic world they fall into with lots of big, multi-part reactions, involving a whole host of animation tricks that are, almost by definition, not possible in limited animation: quick snaps between poses, exaggerated smears that make movement seem more rubbery and comic, facial expressions and body movement that squashes and stretches in big, bouncy ways. It feels rather like Japanese character designs have been treated to the particular form of comic character animation used by Warner Bros. during its golden years in the 1940s and 1950s, and if that was the only thing about The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach that struck me as completely weird and randomly warped, that would have been enough to get me to write the "you guys, this movie is fucking weird, please watch it" review.
Instead, that's so far from being the only thing to meet that level, I would not necessarily expect a viewer who isn't hyperfixated on character animation to even notice it. The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach is, across the board, much more idiosyncratic and odd and almost disorientingly random than I would have ever, ever supposed. We know what the "take the video game and lifelessly shove it into tepid children's animation" version of Super Mario Bros. looks like: it looks like the godawful 1989 American/South Korean TV series The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, which was also an attempt to quickly and cheaply produce some Mariosploitation while the game was still the hottest thing in the toy store. I hate to break it to my seven-year-old self, but that was some crude, ungainly garbage, listlessly plugging elements from the game into boilerplate storytelling, ending in generic kiddie trash that relies on the character designs and sound effects of the games to do all the work of giving it anything resembling an identity. While The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach does in fact use sound effects from the game, almost to the point that it's oppressive, and the score is wall-to-wall cues from the game soundtrack by Kondo Koji - often literally the chiptune music from the game - it's certainly not relying on the game to otherwise do any of its work. It only barely even includes the character designs; not even touching on Luigi's outfit being colored as it never was in the games (purple-blue overalls with a yellow shirt), it feels somewhat feel more like somebody described Kotabe Yoichi's iconic character designs from the instruction manual and game packaging to the animators in great detail, but never actually showed them the drawings. So they're close-ish, but never quite there. In particular, the villainous demonic turtle King Koopa (Wada Akiko) looks much more, I don't know how to put it other than more Japanese, with his design suggesting something inspired by the oni or another folkloric demon or ghost to a degree that I'd never entirely noticed in all my years of playing the games.
And the plot, meanwhile, feels like Takayashiki had skimmed the instructions, noted the three major power ups, and didn't watch a single millisecond of actual gameplay before devising his hallucinatory tale. Mario, in this telling, is a video game addict, and Princess Peach (Yamase Mami) leaps out of his television late one night to beg him for help; he can do absolutely nothing but gawp until an enormous reptilian claw emerges from the TV and grabs her. The next day, he and his cowardly, greedy brother Luigi work at their grocery store, when a caterpillar-like dog runs in, snatches the necklace that appeared in Mario's room after Peach disappeared, and the brothers chase it to a huge structure of silver pipes in the desert. They fall into one of these, and emerge at the feet of a hermit (Miyauchi Kohei), who seems to be primarily comprised of beard; he explains that they have been prophesied to rescue the Mushroom Kingdom from King Koopa, who is a big dumb lovelorn moron trying to destroy everything to impress Peach into marrying him. Once the brothers find a magic mushroom, flower, and star, they can challenge Koopa and restore the kingdom.
"Magic mushroom" is the operative word there. It would be difficult, in a plot summary, to communicate just how weirdly fragmented and erratic the story of The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach is; it belly flops from one setpiece to another, none of which in any way resemble the game except in loose innuendo and detail: a set of evil, fanged mushrooms (who are not, that I noted, ever called kuribo in the film, still less "Goombas") tries to trick the brothers into eating poisoned mushrooms, but they are rescued by sexy toadstool ladies; Mario kills a bunch of spiny turtles by stealing a magic cloud and making it snow, freezing them to death. There elements from the movie that would later show up in future games, most notably a flying wooden ship. By and large, this feels like a hallucination with Mario enemies wandering into phantasmagorical landscapes, some of which come across as basically just your ordinary fantasy worlds, some of which are blatantly psychedelic or surreal - and why not, what isn't psychedelic about the Mario universe, with its arbitrarily floating blocks and enormous mushrooms everywhere? To stitch the disconnected sequences together, the film relies on several musical montages, set to cheery rock songs that have nothing at all to do with Mario that I can tell, and have something like a third of their lyrics in random English words.
Is this at all good? I can't say. It's unexpected, certainly. I will at least go to bat for the character animation, without hesitation, and for the film's goofy portrayal of King Koopa as a pathetic dope, voiced by Wada with a put-on nasal gruffness that makes her sound sound like a boy fighting a losing battle with puberty. The weird mixture of TV-animation cheapness and moody color design make the film feel mildly apocalyptic in a very appealing and nervy way, even while the tone is unrelentingly frothy and comic. What it absolutely never is, is lazy, and given the nature of this project, that's a genuinely masterful achievement; cash-in pop culture ephemera is rarely this prickly and aggressively random. At the very least, I think it's worth every fan of the game series checking it out at least once; it's helpful to remind oneself of just how goddamn surreal this material is, now that it's been so cozily domesticated for literally decades.
*The ramen, moreover, was cross-promoted within the movie itself.
†That is, the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, not the North American Super Mario Bros. 2 from 1988, a reskinned version of the wholly unrelated Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic, which was eventually re-released in Japan as Super Mario USA in 1992.
If this makes it sound like The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach is a greedy little cash-in, that's for the extremely good reason that this is precisely what it was. Nintendo had suddenly found itself at the white-hot center of a wildly popular new medium that, as far as anybody knew, was going to prove to be a fad with a limited shelf life. Decades later, with Mario having firmly established himself as one of the most immediately recognisable characters in all of global pop culture, this can be hard to keep in mind, but it explains a lot of the choices that got made around video game marketing in the 1980s. And, accordingly, the film we now have in front of us, all 61 minutes of it, was designed to be quick and cheap to crank out, racing its way into theaters and back out so it could land on home video while the market was still there for it.
I won't go so far as to say that it transcends all of that - clearly, it does not - but it's a whole lot more interesting and even artistically accomplished than anything I've said thus far would indicate. The creative team wasn't without some pedigree: the director, Hata Masami, was one of the people substantially involved in getting Sanrio's animation division off the ground, to some measure of acclaim, and he'd later be tapped to direct the Japanese side of the benighted trans-Pacific production of 1989's Little Nemo (which I don't think is very many people's idea of an animation classic, but it was a fairly prestigious, well-heeled production); the animation director, Matsuyama Maya, had worked under the legendary, industry-defining Osamu Tezuka; the writer, Takayashiki Hideo, had worked for a time on Lupin III: Part II. Between them, they made sure that The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach was at least credible as a work of animation and design; indeed, I was definitely expecting something much more sloppy and chintzy than this. The nature of very nearly all Japanese animation prior to the mid-'80s was to use relatively low frame-rates and focus more on character poses and expressions than on expressive movement per se; limited animation, to use a Western term that I'm not certain is strictly appropriate to use in this context, and the only reason it changed a little in the 1990s and then a lot in the 21st Century is because the great Miyazaki Hayao openly disliked the form, and his enormous personal gravity helped to shift the entire industry. Miyazaki's taste's notwithstanding, Japanese limited animation never had the same whiff of "this is low-quality crap for television" it had in the West, and was treated as a rich, expressive artform in its own right, enabling such things as the highly distinctive character designs and famously detailed and sumptuous backgrounds used in so much Japanese animation. Imagine my surprise, then, when The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach - which, to recap, was a made-on-the-cheap piece of junk trying to cash on a fad for children - turned out to have quite a remarkable amount of rather involved, lively, comically playful full animation. The main characters, grocer brothers-turned-heroic adventurers Mario (Furuya Toru) and Luigi (Mizushima Yu), react to the weird, psychedelic world they fall into with lots of big, multi-part reactions, involving a whole host of animation tricks that are, almost by definition, not possible in limited animation: quick snaps between poses, exaggerated smears that make movement seem more rubbery and comic, facial expressions and body movement that squashes and stretches in big, bouncy ways. It feels rather like Japanese character designs have been treated to the particular form of comic character animation used by Warner Bros. during its golden years in the 1940s and 1950s, and if that was the only thing about The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach that struck me as completely weird and randomly warped, that would have been enough to get me to write the "you guys, this movie is fucking weird, please watch it" review.
Instead, that's so far from being the only thing to meet that level, I would not necessarily expect a viewer who isn't hyperfixated on character animation to even notice it. The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach is, across the board, much more idiosyncratic and odd and almost disorientingly random than I would have ever, ever supposed. We know what the "take the video game and lifelessly shove it into tepid children's animation" version of Super Mario Bros. looks like: it looks like the godawful 1989 American/South Korean TV series The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, which was also an attempt to quickly and cheaply produce some Mariosploitation while the game was still the hottest thing in the toy store. I hate to break it to my seven-year-old self, but that was some crude, ungainly garbage, listlessly plugging elements from the game into boilerplate storytelling, ending in generic kiddie trash that relies on the character designs and sound effects of the games to do all the work of giving it anything resembling an identity. While The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach does in fact use sound effects from the game, almost to the point that it's oppressive, and the score is wall-to-wall cues from the game soundtrack by Kondo Koji - often literally the chiptune music from the game - it's certainly not relying on the game to otherwise do any of its work. It only barely even includes the character designs; not even touching on Luigi's outfit being colored as it never was in the games (purple-blue overalls with a yellow shirt), it feels somewhat feel more like somebody described Kotabe Yoichi's iconic character designs from the instruction manual and game packaging to the animators in great detail, but never actually showed them the drawings. So they're close-ish, but never quite there. In particular, the villainous demonic turtle King Koopa (Wada Akiko) looks much more, I don't know how to put it other than more Japanese, with his design suggesting something inspired by the oni or another folkloric demon or ghost to a degree that I'd never entirely noticed in all my years of playing the games.
And the plot, meanwhile, feels like Takayashiki had skimmed the instructions, noted the three major power ups, and didn't watch a single millisecond of actual gameplay before devising his hallucinatory tale. Mario, in this telling, is a video game addict, and Princess Peach (Yamase Mami) leaps out of his television late one night to beg him for help; he can do absolutely nothing but gawp until an enormous reptilian claw emerges from the TV and grabs her. The next day, he and his cowardly, greedy brother Luigi work at their grocery store, when a caterpillar-like dog runs in, snatches the necklace that appeared in Mario's room after Peach disappeared, and the brothers chase it to a huge structure of silver pipes in the desert. They fall into one of these, and emerge at the feet of a hermit (Miyauchi Kohei), who seems to be primarily comprised of beard; he explains that they have been prophesied to rescue the Mushroom Kingdom from King Koopa, who is a big dumb lovelorn moron trying to destroy everything to impress Peach into marrying him. Once the brothers find a magic mushroom, flower, and star, they can challenge Koopa and restore the kingdom.
"Magic mushroom" is the operative word there. It would be difficult, in a plot summary, to communicate just how weirdly fragmented and erratic the story of The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach is; it belly flops from one setpiece to another, none of which in any way resemble the game except in loose innuendo and detail: a set of evil, fanged mushrooms (who are not, that I noted, ever called kuribo in the film, still less "Goombas") tries to trick the brothers into eating poisoned mushrooms, but they are rescued by sexy toadstool ladies; Mario kills a bunch of spiny turtles by stealing a magic cloud and making it snow, freezing them to death. There elements from the movie that would later show up in future games, most notably a flying wooden ship. By and large, this feels like a hallucination with Mario enemies wandering into phantasmagorical landscapes, some of which come across as basically just your ordinary fantasy worlds, some of which are blatantly psychedelic or surreal - and why not, what isn't psychedelic about the Mario universe, with its arbitrarily floating blocks and enormous mushrooms everywhere? To stitch the disconnected sequences together, the film relies on several musical montages, set to cheery rock songs that have nothing at all to do with Mario that I can tell, and have something like a third of their lyrics in random English words.
Is this at all good? I can't say. It's unexpected, certainly. I will at least go to bat for the character animation, without hesitation, and for the film's goofy portrayal of King Koopa as a pathetic dope, voiced by Wada with a put-on nasal gruffness that makes her sound sound like a boy fighting a losing battle with puberty. The weird mixture of TV-animation cheapness and moody color design make the film feel mildly apocalyptic in a very appealing and nervy way, even while the tone is unrelentingly frothy and comic. What it absolutely never is, is lazy, and given the nature of this project, that's a genuinely masterful achievement; cash-in pop culture ephemera is rarely this prickly and aggressively random. At the very least, I think it's worth every fan of the game series checking it out at least once; it's helpful to remind oneself of just how goddamn surreal this material is, now that it's been so cozily domesticated for literally decades.
*The ramen, moreover, was cross-promoted within the movie itself.
†That is, the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, not the North American Super Mario Bros. 2 from 1988, a reskinned version of the wholly unrelated Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic, which was eventually re-released in Japan as Super Mario USA in 1992.
