The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

A markedly different experience from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, despite sharing directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (co-directors Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack, as well as screenwriter Matthew Fogel, are back too), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dispenses with any of the tiresome, relatability scaffolding previously applied to this Nintendo juggernaut. Judging by the first instalment, the decision makers behind that film were convinced that audiences wouldn't be able to swallow the adventures of a stout, video game plumber unless the character overcame some trivial personal difficulties within your standard ('90s vintage) big screen adaptation. This galactic chapter though discards similarly shallow attempts at insight, the film instead constructed as a rolling incident machine that does a better - or perhaps just more honest - job of repeatedly showcasing forty-odd years of iterative, Kyoto design. In that sense, Illumination and Nintendo's film is completely given over to the presentation of obsessively layered and rendered landscapes that suggest some, faltering means of progression. So, the industrialised swamp of Peter Jackson's Isengard is transformed into a volcanic theme park that sears cheering lackeys to the bone; and a repulsive golden casino - perhaps a nod to Nintendo the company's beginnings as a playing card manufacturer - becomes an Escher etching that can be traversed in every, counter-intuitive direction. Plotted to be little more than diverting noise, this Mario Galaxy simulates something of the proudly illogical progression seen in the vintage video games that inspired it. A mode of communication in which relentless invention trumps a more careful means of ascension. 

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Even setting aside the Famicom-era nostalgia and a licensed song selection that leans heavily on the dwindling decades of the twentieth century, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a still a feature dripping with throwback thinking. Specifically, the film makes it its business to explain (or attempt to bring some kind of logical order to) the deliberately surreal flourishes that 8-bit video games are built out of. Matthew Fogel's screenplay is pointedly pre-Marvel then, in the sense that it doesn't trust the audience to not get caught up on the minor details that power this technicolour fantasy. So not only is Mario's beloved Brooklyn a building site riddling with rising platforms and gloomy pipes - the film even adopts the flat two-dimensional perspective of a buzzing CRT television when Mario begins hurdling through one set of hazards - but the mushroom power-ups, that we know Mario will soon have to gobble up, are given an apprehensive dimension. In this way Chris Pratt's pixelated plumber is given an opportunity to overcome the minor fears associated with dinnertime fussiness - a note that may well have some resonance with the film's intended audience of children - as well as the more obvious peril associated with an enormous, fire-breathing dinosaur.