The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

The Melancholy of the Spheres

If the first *Super Mario Bros. Movie* was a sugar-rush of recognition—a colorful, frantic checklist of everything we remembered from our basement NES sessions—its sequel, *The Super Mario Galaxy Movie*, dares to ask a question rarely posed by billion-dollar animated juggernauts: What happens when the playground runs out of gravity? Directors Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath have returned, not merely to expand the "brand," but to fundamentally alter the physics of their animated universe. By lifting the plumber out of the Mushroom Kingdom and casting him into the cold, velvet silence of the cosmos, they have traded the comfort of nostalgia for the vertigo of the sublime.

The film wastes little time on earthly tethers. We are thrust almost immediately into the star-strewn void, a visual landscape that feels less like a cartoon backdrop and more like a vast, indifferent ocean through which our heroes must swim. The technical achievement here is not just in the rendering of light—though the way starlight refracts off the polished carapace of the starships is breathtaking—but in the brave disorientation of its camera work.



Jelenic and Horvath utilize the unique "spherical gravity" mechanic of the 2007 source material to create a visual language of isolation. Characters do not walk *across* stages; they orbit tiny, fragile planetoids. This creates a fascinating tension between the slapstick comedy of the script and the visual reality of the characters' precariousness. When Mario leaps, he is not just jumping; he is launching himself into an abyss, trusting that the gravity of the next small world will catch him. It is a surprisingly existential metaphor for a family film, suggesting that our connections to one another are the only things keeping us from drifting away entirely.

The emotional anchor of this cosmic drift is found in the new additions to the ensemble. While Chris Pratt’s Mario remains the eager, slightly overwhelmed everyman, it is the arrival of Rosalina (voiced with regal, sorrowful grace by Brie Larson) that shifts the film’s tonal axis. Rosalina is a figure of maternal solitude, a storybook princess who watches over the Lumas—star-children destined to burn out to create new galaxies.



The film’s most daring choice is to retain the "storybook" sequences from the game—quiet, watercolor-styled flashbacks that detail Rosalina’s loss and loneliness. These moments provide a hush that is deafening amidst the noise of the adventure genre. They suggest a maturity that the first film aggressively avoided. Counterbalancing this melancholy is the inspired, chaotic casting of Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr. Safdie, a filmmaker known for anxiety-inducing independent cinema, brings a nasally, desperate energy to the Koopa heir. He is not just a villain; he is a child acting out for the attention of an emotionally distant father, adding a layer of pathetic dysfunction to the Koopa dynamics that feels surprisingly human.



Ultimately, *The Super Mario Galaxy Movie* succeeds because it allows itself to be strange. It embraces the surrealism of its source material—ghosts in gravity wells, gardens blooming in vacuums—to create a film that feels like a lucid dream. It is a work that understands that looking up at the stars should be an act of wonder, not just a setup for a sequel. Where the first film was a celebration of playing a game, this one is a meditation on the worlds we dream up when the console is turned off.