SOME of the new characters added to The Super Mario Bros. Movie were created by Nintendo.
The story originally put Mario in the real world, before he is transported to the magical world of the video games.
Nintendo shared original sketches with the studio.
When Mario is in the real world, Illumination decided that he would need a big family that sets him in real life.
However, aside from his brother Luigi, no members of the Mario family have been shown in the games.
In an interview with Polygon, the film’s directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, spoke about how they reached out to Nintendo to seek their approval.
Horvath said: “Nintendo were completely open to it — they were fully on board with this cinematic representation of Mario.
“[The company] knows that he’s not just going to be a guy who appears from a pipe and says ‘Wahoo!’ and then he’s off on his adventure.
“We needed to do a little more work to believe that he’s a real guy with a real life and real problems. So they were totally on board with creating this family for Mario.”
Nintendo agreed to expand upon Mario’s family, and even shared sketches with Illumination, for his relatives’ original designs.
The team creating the Mario games had originally made sketches for Mario’s family, but ultimately decided not to include them in the games.
Horvath explains: “They did send us character sketches that they had done years ago that they had never used.
“Mario’s dad is almost like a one-to-one design adaptation of [Nintendo’s] original Mario’s dad design that they provided us. That was really great to be able to get that in the movie.”
However, not all of the designs were exactly how Nintendo imagined them, including making the grandpa look “more like Mario”.
The movie was created as a collaboration between the two companies, with both parties sharing ideas for the film.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
