[COLUMN] Who Are the Recent Super Mario Bros. Movies For? | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers of some plot points in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. If you’re looking for a capsule review, I was mildly more charmed by it than I was by the first film, particularly in the first forty minutes. While it has a lot of the same flaws as the first film, feeling overly pandering and nostalgic, with no real substance and no real sense of the experience of playing a Mario game just the simulation of their aesthetics, those forty minutes do actually manage a sense of wonder that was lacking from the first film, constantly punctured by self-aware jokes. Sadly, in its second half, the film descends into cameo and reference nonsense, losing any sense of awe or majesty. So, swings and roundabouts. 

It can often seem just a little passive-aggressive for a review to explicitly ask, “Who is this for?” It is one step shy of the assertion that “nobody wants this”, which is itself just an attempt to turn “I do not want this” into a more general statement. Still, it is instructive to try and figure out who a specific film or television show is intended to cater towards: a general audience or an army of specific devotees, new viewers or old fans, adults or children, men or women.

This is a large part of what makes The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie so interesting. On the surface level, these are very obviously children’s films. They are cartoons from Illumination, the animation studio at Universal largely responsible for the Despicable Me and Minions franchises. They are bright and colorful, and are intensely simplistic in their storytelling. They are both rated “PG” rather than the slightly edgier “PG-13.”

Indeed, it’s telling that many of the critical defenses of the movies fall back on the old rhetorical cliché of reminding readers that these movies are “for kids”, with an implicit argument that this should insulate them from more rigorous criticism. Still, even setting aside the argument that it is possible to hold kids’ media to a high critical standard, from Bluey to Pixar, it is generally understood that the target audience for these films is younger than that of, say, the Spider-Verse movies.

There is certainly some truth in this. Although it is hard to objectively quantify such things, kids certainly love the two Super Mario Bros. movies. Anybody who has any interaction with children understands that the movie struck a chord with younger viewers, who responded enthusiastically to it. All that said, actually watching these two films, it is hard to shake the feeling that children are not the film’s only – or even primary – audience.

It is worth considering the soundtrack to The Super Mario Bros. Movie. In its opening five minutes, the film features an action comedy set piece set to “Battle Without Honor or Humanity”, an obvious allusion to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, which is certainly not a film most preschoolers recognize. An early foot race through New York is set to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ’Til Brooklyn.” A trip to Kongland features a kart ride set to A-Ha’s “Take on Me.”

The references in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie are more visual and cinematic than aural. At one point, Bowser (Jack Black) sinks claw-last into a pool of magma, evoking an iconic visual from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. At another point, Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) frantically tries to break her sister Rosaline (Brie Larson) free from a glass case as a doomsday weapon builds to critical mass; failing that, the two press their palms against the glass recalling Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

While there is a long history of easter eggs buried in children’s entertainment aimed at an adult audience, designed to make sure that any parents or guardians in attendance are paying attention and in on the joke, these choices are not that. These are not easter eggs subtly tucked away within the film for the discerning viewer to turn over at their leisure. These creative choices are front and center. It is impossible to miss them. For lack of better phrasing, they insist upon themselves.

For example, when The Super Mario Bros. Movie pays homage to the “Mario Bros. Rap” from 1989, it does not play out in the background of the scene. It is not a line from the rap dropped slyly out of context. It is not even the opening bars of a character’s ringtone. The Super Mario Bros. Movie stops dead so that it can play a commercial-within-the-movie for the eponymous characters’ plumbing business, set to a version of the rap.

These choices combine to create a sense that it is not simply that The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie are not just welcoming to adult audiences, but actively courting them with fan service aimed very explicitly at them. Kids will not understand or relate to these references or allusions – they may play as a sort of surrealist or absurdist joke, but these elements are not designed to appeal to the sensibility of children, but to pander to the nostalgia of adults.

This is reflected more explicitly in the thematic and narrative content of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. As a rule, films aimed at children tend to focus on dynamics that make sense to them, with even adult protagonists often defined by their relationship to a parent: Ariel (Jodi Benson) to Triton (Kenneth Mars) in The Little Mermaid, Simba (Matthew Broderick) to Mufasa (James Earl Jones) in The Lion King, even Belle (Paige O'Hara) to Maurice (Rex Everhart) in Beauty and the Beast.

This is partially true within The Super Mario Bros. Movie, where part of Mario’s (Chris Pratt) ostensible motivation is to prove his business acumen to his disapproving family, including his father (Charles Martinet). There is a sense in which this is mirrored, albeit clumsily, in the way that Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) seems to view for the love and approval of his own father, Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen). It’s not really developed or explored, it’s very rudimentary, but it’s there.

In contrast, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie drops any real pretense of a child’s perspective. Instead, it focuses largely on the characters as parents. Rosaline is introduced taking care of a castle full of infant stars, reading them bedtime stories. They call her “mommy” and she talks about them as her children. Bowser’s arc in the film consists largely of reconnecting with his own son Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie), who he neglected in his plots to conquer the universe.

Even when Peach delves into her own heritage as a foundling, an abandoned princess discovered by the inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom and seemingly immediately appointed their monarch because “princess” is an absolute quality in this fantasy world, she doesn’t find her parents. There is no mention of a mother or a father. Instead, Peach simply connects with her older sister, Rosaline. The two characters may as well have sprung into being fully formed.

It is perhaps too much to suggest that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is concerned with things like themes, but the film does suggest the redemptive power of children. Both Bowser and Rosaline are, in their own ways, saved by their children. Bowser Jr. rescues his father from captivity. The star children guide Mario and Peach on their mission to rescue Rosaline. Even then, this is all from the perspective of the parents.

Bowser monologues to his soldiers about getting lost “on the Rainbow Road of life”, only to be rescued by “a tiny version of [him].” In this context, children exist as simply an extension of their parents, a means of redemption or validation. It is too much to compare The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, but both films look at children through the eyes of parents as primary characters, hoping that the kids will be all right.

This is not the perspective of a film aimed primarily at children. This is a children’s film aimed squarely at adults. Reportedly 62% of the opening weekend audience for The Super Mario Bros. Movie was between the ages of 18 and 34, with 52% of the total audience over 25. There is a strange dissonance at play here. These are children’s films, and extremely simplistic children’s films at that, but they are designed to appeal to adult moviegoers.

This is in some ways the culmination of contemporary Hollywood blockbuster cinema, the desire to craft a “four-quadrant hit”, a movie that appeals equally to men and women, children and adults. Movies like this cost so much to make these days that the only way that they can be profitable is to appeal to everyone, and so that leads to sort of a lowest common denominator filmmaking. It leads to a sort of a flattening of culture, where something like this has to be for adults and kids.

This explains how the default form of the American blockbuster has shifted over the past thirty years from more adult-skewing thrillers like Enemy of the State to largely bloodless and sexless superhero films. In some ways, The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie are the culmination of this trend, movies that feel like they should be aimed at children but which are instead more aggressively tailored to tickle the nostalgia centers of adults.

There is something vaguely frustrating in this. For a little while, with the success of Pixar and with Studio Ghibli entering mainstream global family film culture, it seemed like the push might be to make children’s films that treated younger viewers as mature individuals capable of engaging with big ideas like mortality or self-actualization. Instead, it seems like the end point of this trend is to produce entertainment that largely addresses adults like they are children.

On a recent episode of the podcast The Big Picture, host Sean Fennessey noted that “there's been this, like, shift where instead of young kids trying to go to older adult comedies, you have older people going to movies for five years.” Family friendly entertainment used to be a gateway for children to branch out into more adult-friendly media – think about the amount of references to Citizen Kane in The Simpsons. Now it mostly seems to be about convincing adults to watch children’s films.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with an adult enjoying The Super Mario Bros. Movie or The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Life is short and people enjoy what they enjoy. However, it does feel disconcerting how much effort the two films have put into directly appealing to adults as a primary market and how they are doing that. These are not children’s films that adults might happen to enjoy watching, these are children’s movies that adults are expected to watch en masse.

It’s a very strange thing, but it is undoubtedly a clear shift in the way that these kinds of movies are packaged and sold. It exists in a broader context of a culture that seems designed to infantilize audiences into adulthood, often by crafting kid-centric media aimed squarely at consumers in their thirties and beyond. When Disney opened Beauty and the Beast in cinemas, Universal released Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear as counterprogramming for adults. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opens largely unchallenged, with A24 indie The Drama as the only other major release.

There is a sense that even articulating this observation sounds alarmist, that it represents some broader panic about the state of industry or culture reflected in a cartoon about a plumber. In truth, it is just a reflection of larger trends over the past few decades, changing how movies are made. Still, it is interesting to look at The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and ask who they are made for, because the answer is in its own way revealing.