Super Mario Bros. Wonderlooks like it may live up to its title by virtue of the simple fact that it showsNintendofinally bringing its reputation for innovation to Mario’s look. The plumber is the joy of gaming personified, and Wonder looks to reflect that with a visual style that applies stylized animation over traditional 3D models and environments. Word bubbles pop up as characters quip during levels, and the game’s Wonder Seed mechanic can change the look and rules of a level on a dime. It’s a visual inventiveness that reminds me of another piece of art that gave a long-running character a stylish overhaul:Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
For years, 2DMariogames have been aesthetically stagnant, but in the plumber’s early days, each new game looked different than the last. Super Mario Bros. had a completely different aesthetic than Super Mario Bros. 2 which looked entirely different than Super Mario Bros. 3. The look changed again for the series’SNESdebut, Super Mario World and saw its most radical reinvention for that game’s sequel, Yoshi’s Island. Nintendo’s other 2D platformers, similarly, messed with the limits of what a 2D game could look like. Donkey Kong Country was 2.5D before we had a word (or, really, the tech) for it.
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But in the ‘00s, Nintendo settled on one look for the series’ 2D games and has stuck with it for almost two decades. New Super Mario Bros. was the first 2D platformer to take the character models you would see in a 3D Mario, flip them sideways, and call it a day. The game wasn’t aesthetically interesting, but it did create a kind of parity between the series’ console and handheld outings, flattening the look so that regardless of where you were playing, it looked like “Mario.” Nintendo has stuck to this boring decision across four sequels on Wii, 3DS, and Wii U, plus a remastered version of the Wii U game on Switch.
It reminds me of the funk that 3D animated movies were stuck in for a long time. The technology got better, so Toy Story 4 looks sharper than Toy Story 2, but otherwise the films appeared constrained to a sort of cartoony photorealism. DreamWorks, Illumination, Pixar, and Disney were all doing essentially the same style, with minor variations, for decades. That all changed with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
The 2018 superhero film took feature-length Western animation in a bold new direction by merging computer-generated images with comic book aesthetics. It was more vibrant than any studio animation in (at least) the decade preceding it, with bold colors and lines, a frame rate that changed to suit the story and action, and comic book bubble grain that gave texture to the backgrounds of New York City. It’s too simple to say that the movie is traditional CG animation with hand drawn animation applied over top, but that’s the simplest way to understand the effect it achieves.
And, it opened a whole new world for other animation studios, too. Since Spider-Verse, Entergalactic, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Turning Red, The Mitchells vs. The Machines, and the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem have all experimented with similar styles. CG animation, which had settled into a rut, suddenly had a new paradigm.
I’m hoping that Super Mario Bros. Wonder can have a similar impact on the Mario games. With qualitative words like “good” and “fantastic” appearing on the screen when Mario stomps a Goomba, the game seems to be working to evolve Mario’s aesthetic so that it has a greater give-and-go with the gameplay. Similarly, getting a Wonder Seed can radically reshape the look of the level. Mario’s aesthetics (like much of the CG animation of the past two decades) have largely been functional, but uninteresting. With Wonder, Nintendo seems to be reconsidering Mario’s look and rebuilding it from the ground up.
Time will tell if Super Mario Bros. Wonder has a major impact on the Mario series. But giving the Mario series an aesthetic overhaul is a worthy goal, in itself. The Mario games have always been creative, but it’s been a long time since that verve extended to their look. Let’s a go.
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