Author | Kou Dayong
Nintendo, entering the movie industry, succeeded.
"Super Mario Brothers Movie" (hereinafter referred to as "Mario"), adapted from the classic IP, since its global release on April 5, on April 18, the global box office has exceeded 700 million US dollars, topping the global box office champion in 2023.
Intuitively, this is a Nintendo "fan-oriented" movie. The Super Mario series is Nintendo's highest-grossing game, and it is a monument in the game field. Mario has even become a symbol of Japanese pop culture, and when Japan bid for the Olympics, then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cosplayed Mario once, which shows its influence.
Poster for the movie "Super Mario Bros. Movie"
For the three generations of the post-80s, post-90s and post-00s, the word "Nintendo" means joy in the game world. After all, when Yamauchi founded Nintendo at the end of the 19th century, he had good wishes for it - in Japanese, "ren" means luck, "ten" represents heaven, and "do" represents the gathering place. Nintendo, literally translated as "Land of Lucky Paradise".
Under the short review of the "Mario" movie Douban alone, the comment "Can people go to Nintendo after death" received the highest praise of 3582.
Although Nintendo has a large player base around the world, it is by no means relying on the feelings of gamers to achieve such good box office results.
After all, 30 years ago, Nintendo made a live-action version of "Super Mario Bros.", with a very dismal reputation and box office, and was even jokingly called Nintendo's "black history" by fans.
1993 film Super Mario Bros.
The movie "Mario" is charming, and my friends, whether Nintendo players or not, gave a consistent evaluation after watching the movie: this is a very interesting movie, and I feel very happy watching it, especially the characters, lines and action design, flowing clouds and full of laughter.
The division of Douban 8.0 also puts "Mario" in the upstream of the field of game adaptation movies.
Mario, a chubby red hat, has not only attracted generations of gamers, but also successfully captured the hearts of non-gamers after appearing on the screen. How is this done?
01
Movies also have gameplay
As a movie, Mario tells a very routine and simple story: Mario and his brother Luigi are ordinary plumbers who are sucked into a bizarre world in the sewer (this world is the big platter of Nintendo game scenes) in a municipal water pipe burst accident.
Mario falls to the righteous Mushroom Country and meets Princess Brigitte, while his brother falls into the hands of the villain Coupon, who is planning to marry the princess and conquer the world.
The story revolves around Mario's adventures, and the final ending is rightfully that Mario defeats Coupon and saves his brother and the world.
It can't be simpler, and the routine can't be more routine. Audiences will pay for this kind of plot, largely because this plot arrangement is very appropriate in Nintendo movies.
Anyone who has played Super Mario or any other Nintendo game knows that Nintendo's games have never featured a deeply gripping story, and its game production team is more focused on gameplay - that is, the core element of the game.
The design of levels and game mechanics is the most unique part of Nintendo games.
Therefore, "Super Mario" has gone through countless iterations, from the 2D side-scrolling game to the 3D world of "Odyssey", each game has a different gameplay, but Mario has been repeating the plot of saving the princess.
Mario and the princess
The same is true of Nintendo's other ace game, The Legend of Zelda, where the plot framework of each game remains largely unchanged, with the ultimate goal of the player-controlled character Link defeating the boss Ganon and saving the princess and the continent of Hyrule.
However, the gameplay of each game is very different, the earlier Zelda was a linear box court game, while The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has become the benchmark for open-world games, and judging from the upcoming sequel "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" game clips, this will be another game with a completely different gameplay from the previous game.
How to make these thin game plots withstand the density of a movie has become the core problem that Nintendo has to solve. However, Nintendo is a game company after all, and Mario is its main game IP, and the adaptation of game content must not harm the value of IP.
Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom PV
Generally speaking, a major difficulty faced by game adaptation movies is that the narrative logic of games and movies is not the same, the former gradually unfolds in the player's participation, and the player's experience and the game plot cooperate with each other to form a complete story experience, so the integrity of the story itself is not high, and some pale or unreasonable parts are irrelevant.
However, adapting into a movie requires filling the part of the player's experience with solid content, which requires higher completion of the plot.
But doing so often causes gamers to "dislike" with adaptations.
There are more original plots, which will be inconsistent with the characters and game plots that players understand; But too close to the game, it is difficult to make its plot full and moving enough to support the capacity of a movie.
Screenshot of The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Therefore, although there are successful cases such as "Tomb Raider" and "League of Legends: Battle of Two Cities" in game adaptations, there are countless cases of failure. Even a movie like "Warcraft" that sold 1.5 billion at the box office in Chinese mainland caused dissatisfaction among game audiences because the story was placed in the world view of "World of Warcraft", but it told a more original story.
Nintendo noticed these problems, and the film was produced by Nintendo's legendary game producer Shigeru Miyamoto, who said in an interview with the media that if you set Mario with too detailed a background, it will affect subsequent game development.
In the end, Nintendo's solution was to simply inherit the thin plot of the game and turn the entire movie into a game hodgepodge, allowing the audience to experience the charm of Nintendo games in Mario.
Racing cars in the movie
02
Full of Easter eggs
In many game adaptations, game elements appear as worldviews and Easter eggs, and in Mario, the game becomes the main body of the movie. As a result, in the eyes of some viewers, "Mario" is "all Easter eggs, without a plot".
This is not necessarily synonymous with "bad movies" for game adaptation movies, but because of the existence of Easter eggs, the audience as players can link the fun of the game from watching the movie.
"Mario" spends a lot of space to show the mechanics and gameplay of Nintendo games, and the scene settings are paved with various Nintendo elements, most of the scenes in the movie are from "Super Mario Bros.", "Super Mario: Odyssey", "Mario Racing 8", "Bang Gang Country" and other games.
Super Mario: Odyssey
There are also many Easter eggs that players will laugh when they see it, such as Mario's most hated food is mushrooms, the "1-2" level prompt that appears on the screen when entering the underground pipeline, and the phrase "the princess is not in this castle" from the mushroom kingdom guard, which is a game meme that players understand.
In Mario, the story is only one of the elements of the film, not the core of the film. That's why Miyamoto said that the way the film was made was very close to his idea of developing the game.
This treatment can cleverly resolve the drawbacks of a weak plot and prevent excessive adaptation from causing player dissatisfaction. However, if such a movie is to be good, then it must be exciting enough in the action design.
A still from The Super Mario Bros. movie
Fortunately, this is what Nintendo does best. Nintendo is an imagination-driven company that has decades of accumulation in how to create interesting interactive experiences, whimsical transformations, strange props, and unexpected level designs are all things that Nintendo is good at.
Therefore, Nintendo has no shortage of interesting action design ideas, and the challenge is how to transform the joy that should be felt by the player in the operation into an infectious picture.
Nintendo's approach is: paving. The movie almost brought Nintendo's most interesting game mechanics to life: a water pipe can teleport, eating mushrooms can change body size, you can bombard opponents with missiles while racing, and you can transform into a kitten to fight. These ingenuity are classic game designs accumulated by Nintendo for decades, which are very imaginative and substitutionary.
The movie is paved with Nintendo's various game mechanics
Every creative presentation is presented in the cleanest visual way possible, without dragging the mud. They appear densely in the movies and are dizzying. Why do eating mushrooms transform? Why can I release fireballs when I touch a flower? And what about the car flying? I don't explain too much about all this.
As a result, what the audience ends up seeing is a fast-paced, Nintendo action movie, and as the adventure unfolds, Mario reproduces the level challenges in "Super Mario", the showdown in "Bang Qigang Country", the rainbow track and prop battles of "Mario Racing" and other game content on the screen.
Rainbow track in the movie
Satisfied with the fast pace of the film and captivated by Nintendo's surprising imagination, the average viewer can't help but wonder what interesting props are hidden in the next box with question marks. The game content fully satisfies the psychology of players looking for Easter eggs, and when they see familiar scenes and actions, they can't wait to have a controller in front of them to operate it themselves.
03
The princess does not have to be saved
In addition to the action and rhythm, "Mario" also flesh out the film by fleshing out the character setting.
The most Nintendo thing about the entire film is that the production company "Lighting Entertainment" puts the Mario brothers in an American family, which adds a layer of realistic tension between "individual and family" in the theme of the movie.
However, after watching the entire movie, I still feel that the added stroke is somewhat redundant, which is very inconsistent with the overhead world view and relaxed and happy style of the entire movie.
Fortunately, the movie does not delve into this point, even if Mario and Dongqi have just been trapped in the stomach of a fish, and when they achieve the reconciliation of their relationship by talking about each other's father, the discussion ends abruptly with a quip.
Mario brothers
In contrast, the villain Coupon has been changed much more, and the design principle of Nintendo games has always been that it is suitable for all ages, and it has been well inherited by the movie, even the villain is funny.
Therefore, Coupon is designed as a pure love man, who can play the piano and sing love songs, and his original intention of conquering the world is only to impress the princess's heart, and his hostility to Mario comes from jealousy in love.
One of the most deconstructed episodes in the film is when CoolBully's subordinates finally discover that their boss is planning to conquer the world only to win the princess's heart, they are all dumbfounded and frustrated. And when the Cool Overlord said that if the princess refused, he would destroy the Mushroom Country, the subordinates immediately recovered their motivation and cheered like a tsunami.
The stupidity and nonsense of Cool Bully, superimposed with the evil desires of his subordinates, constitute a complete villain's evil motive, and this unexpected realism, which separates Cool Bully from pure evil, is a very ingenious design in the movie.
Spitfire Boss
The most laudable character change in the film, namely the subversion of the image of the princess.
In the past Super Mario series of games, the princess has always been waiting to be rescued. Shigeru Miyamoto once said a very classic saying: good games can make players satisfied. In an era when games are generally considered to be played by men, the bridge of "saving the princess" undoubtedly satisfies the psychological needs of male players well.
But with the rise of feminist thought, it is undoubtedly inappropriate to repeat such a plot in the movie. So in the movie "Mario", the relationship between Mario and the princess is completely subverted, and Mario no longer wants to save the princess, but his younger brother.
The princess has also changed from an image and symbol to a full-fledged character: confident, courageous, capable, full of responsibility and leadership. Moreover, the princess and Mario are completely equal partners, even Mario's initiators.
In the movie, the princess kicks the dragon to smash
This modern interpretation of the princess image is very encouraging. However, this change is still not complete. At the end of the film, although the princess has the same strength as Mario, she can only cheer on the side when Mario and Coupon fight.
Why the hero who saved the world is Mario is actually not logically supported, but the result of different character positioning.
This kind of character tension can't be resolved in the framework of Super Mario, because it's the undertone of the game.
A still from The Super Mario Bros. movie
Many people said after watching the movie that Nintendo made a big game promo. This reminds me of a scene in the movie where Luigi commented after watching Mario's advertisement for the plumbing company: It's a good ad. And Mario retorted: "It's not an advertisement, it's a movie!" ”
Sounds a lot like Nintendo's self-deprecation and justification. But it doesn't matter if it's even an advertisement, Mario is fun, fun, and that's enough for the audience.
The pictures in the article come from the Internet
Edit | Wu Qing
Typesetting | Fifi
Keep an eye on the South Wind Window to see more highlights