The second trailer for the Super Mario Bros movie is very much the Princess Peach trailer,
and the internet is abuzz with discussion over how Peach is no longer the damsel in
distress we’ve seen countless times in games, but is now… an actual leader.
While it really is too early to make assumptions about Peach’s role in the film, yes, it is nice to
see her do something more than bake cakes and get kidnapped. That said, this isn’t entirely without
precedent. This is another aspect of Mario lore that we’ve seen in cartoon form before.
Many of us remember the various DIC animations of the ‘90s, and the more active role that Princess
Toadstool plays in a lot of episodes. Yes, she gets captured a lot, but she’s not above,
for example, running for election against King Koopa, proving her chops not just as a damsel
in distress, but as a legitimate politician. In my previous video on the movie, I noted
the importance of Mario’s Brooklyn accent. It’s been confirmed through leaked posters that Mario
and Luigi are from the real world Brooklyn in the new movie – you can even see the Brooklyn Bridge
towering over scene. I can’t help but conclude that there must be a lot of the Super Mario Bros
Super Show in the mix with this film, and that includes Princess Peach’s role as something more
than a maguffin or a pretty lamp to be rescued. This makes tremendous sense from a narrative
perspective. Miyamoto’s guiding principle with Mario has always been to paint in
broad strokes from a story perspective, and allow the characters to be blank slates,
all the better to let players project their own gameplay experiences onto the story. Is
Mario a hyper-competent superhero? Or a bumbling, hapless fool who’s just barely scraping by? That
all depends on how you, the player, play the game. Similarly, Princess Peach doesn’t really represent
anything, beyond a goal to work towards. Are Peach and Mario romantically involved?
Or is Mario simply helping out a friend in need? It’s up to you to decide (although certain story
beats do hint at this one way or the other). The problem with adapting these empty vessel
characters to the big screen, is that without a narrative arc for the characters, without personal
growth or lessons learned, a story told through a passive media feels like it lacks something.
This is ultimately the problem with a lot of video game movies – and why it’s so important,
for example, for Sonic the Hedgehog to learn and relearn the power of friendship.
Thus, Mario needs to start out getting his face smooshed by Donkey Kong, before
learning to use a fire flower, and eventually defeating Bowser. It’s satisfying to see a film
character grow and progress, in a way that’s not as necessary in games when it’s actually
the player that is growing and progressing. Peach, then needs to be something more than
an object to be obtained. She is not, to quote another princess, “just some prize to be won”.
Indeed, the Disney formula of presenting princesses as heroic, capable masters of
their own destiny is well established, not just in terms of how well it builds a story,
but also – how much merchandise you can sell. The problem, the concern with making Peach a
capable leader of an army of Toads, is it runs the risk of falling into a common movie trope – one
which is particularly common in animated films. She’s got shades of Gwen Stacy from Into the
Spider-Verse, or WyldStyle from the LEGO Movie. She’s the well trained, knowledgeable, brilliant
woman…but this isn’t her movie. These characters are inevitably sidelined by the hapless heroes who
need to overcome a fatal personality flaw. The problem with these kinds of competent
characters – and we see this a lot in Disney films too – is that there’s nowhere really for
them to go, no lesson for them to learn. Princess Jasmine, Belle, Rapunzel, Tiana,
Pocahontas – these characters are often come into the story already knowing everything they need to
know to fulfil their role in the narrative, and then end up being supplementary to a male
hero who actually has to learn a lesson. This being the case, while it’s fun to see
Peach actually display something akin to personal agency, I won’t be surprised if,
at some point in the film, she still ends up captured by Bowser, in desperate need of rescue.
The trailers for these films are so filled with visual references that there’s no way
the creators will be able to resist a scene with Mario and Bowser fighting on a bridge, while Peach
is either being held in Bowser’s arms, or trapped in a cage somewhere to the left of all the action.
In the meantime, we do know that the film has at least one damsel in distress,
and that damsel’s name is Luigi. This is perfect.
Because, unlike Mario and Peach, Luigi is allowed to have a clearly defined
personality within the games. He’s not a blank slate that the player need to project onto;
he wears his heart on his sleeve, because he is a tremendous coward.
No, that’s not fair. He’s actually not a coward. Because Luigi’s defining attribute is the fact
that he’s scared a lot of the time, but he gulps down his fear and does the right thing anyway.
What’s interesting is that participating in Luigi conquering his fears often makes him more
relatable to the player. More human, more capable of emotional investment, than Mario, the blank
slate designed for maximum relatability. See also Wario and Waluigi, people often appreciate being
given some eccentricities they can latch onto. It’s ultimately no wonder that so many people
are responding so strongly to seeing Princess Peach display a bit of literal
fire. This could very well end up becoming the definitive Peach in fans’ minds.
But how, short of a trip to a haunted house, do we get Luigi’s Mansion vibes into this film?
Why not have Luigi get captured by Bowser? Problem solved. He gets to be terrified and traumatised,
just as audiences want him to be, and he’s in the right place to have a heroic moment
in the final act of the film. At least, that’s how it looks
from trailers at this point. This, after all, is purely
speculative. None of us mere mortals have any idea of the content of the full film,
and it’s difficult to know, based on a few short minutes of heavily edited content exactly what
kind of characters we’ll see in this movie. We won’t know for certain until the film is
in cinemas. Any guesswork before that, is merely, guesswork.