Crew
Directors – Aaron Horvath & Michael Jelenic, Co-Directors – Pierre Leduc & Fabien Polack, Screenplay – Matthew Fogel, Producers – Chris Meledandri & Shigeru Miyamoto, Music – Brian Tyler, Animation Directors – Christophe DeLisle & Ludovic Roz, Computer Graphics Supervisors – Francois Boudaille & David Pelle, Production Design – Guillaume Arteros. Production Company – Illumination Entertainment/Nintendo.
Voices
Chris Pratt (Mario Mario), Charlie Day (Luigi Mario), Anya Taylor-Joy (Princess Peach), Jack Black (Bowzer), Donald Glover (Yoshi), Benny Safdie (Bowser Junior), Brie Larson (Rosalina), Glen Powell (Fox McLeod), Keegen-Michael Key (Toad), Kevin Michael Richardson (Kamek), Luis Guzman (Wart), Eric Bauza (Toad General), Issa Rae (Money Queen)
Plot
The Mario brothers, Mario and Luigi, the plumbers from Brooklyn, come to the aid of a village of Mushroom People. During the course of this, they encounter Yoshi, a dinosaur from Earth who has emerged through the pipes to the other realm. Joined by Yoshi, the Mario Brothers set out to stop Bowser Jr after he abducts Princess Rosalina and then her sister Princess Peach in an attempt to free his father. However, the fight to stop him transports all of them to another galaxy.
Super Mario Bros. (1983) started out a videogame created by Nintendo and has gone onto become one of the top-selling games of all time. To date there have been around seventeen Super Mario games and sequels. That is not counting the spinoff games, which number more than 150. (This incidentally makes the Super Mario brothers the videogame characters that have appeared in the most ever videogames). Super Mario was also the basis of the first ever Videogame Adaptation with Super Mario Bros. (1993), although this was universally disparaged.
The game was later revived on the big screen with the animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023). This was a huge hit, the second highest grossing film of its year. The same directors and most of the principal voice cast return with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The sequel enjoyed the same success and as of halfway through 2026 is the top-grossing film of the year, earning a third more than any other nearest competitor.
These Super Mario animated films come from Illumination Entertainment who first appeared with Despicable Me (2010), which proved an unexpected audience hit. The small supporting characters of the Minions went on to take over popular culture and there have been multiple Despicable Me sequels and Minions spinoff films. Elsewhere, Illumination have conducted the Dr Seuss adaptation The Lorax (2012) and The Grinch (2018) and spun off two other popular hits with The Secret Life of Pets (2016) and Sing (2016), both of which have spawned sequels. It is a company that has perfected the machinery of franchise animation.
I have switched off watching mainstream Animation in recent years. I used to enjoy it but it has now become nothing more than endless regurgitation of corporate IP where characters and scenarios that strike a chord with audiences the first time around are dragged out through endless adventures with minimal difference – look no further than Illumination’s Despicable Me sequels.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is one of the worst examples of this. It is a follow-up to a previously successful film. The characters are back for more of the same. They get minimal development – Mario admits an embarrassed attraction for Princess Peach. Peach gets a sister in Rosalina. Bowser is back and gets a son. The film adapts Super Mario Galaxy (2007), one of the most popular the Super Mario games, and its sequel Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010), although elements are wound in from other Nintendo properties including the Star Fox games.
A good deal has gone into The Super Mario Galaxy Movie in terms of detail and animation. And yet for all this, it is an utterly irrelevant film that can be forgotten before it even ends. Firstly, like the first film, it is pitched down at a level where it exists as no more than eye candy for people around the five-year-old age group and has zero appeal for anybody older than that unless you are a dedicated fan of the games.
Secondly, the film has been intended as a fast-paced kinetic run from one animated sequence to the next. There are assorted new characters introduced but we barely get to know them, while the recurring ones scarcely get any development. Things happen – giant robots, a new princess, journeys through space to multiple galaxies, adventures on different planets, the Marios reduced to being kids, dinosaurs, visits to intergalactic casinos, and assorted gimmicks that allows the Marios and others to power up. What is missing in any of this is anything that remotely resembles a plot connecting it together. It exists just as one high paced jump between sequences.
The other issue might be that none of this exists in any kind of universe that makes the slightest sense. Worlds of mushroom people, hopping between entire galaxies (where galaxy has an entirely different meaning from what it does in astronomy – in the game, the word ‘galaxy’ is used to simply refer to another game level rather a stellar system containing billions of stars), dinosaurs, robots and spaceships mixing with magical princesses and artifacts. Usually when I watch a fantasy film, I expect the universe it is set in to operate on some kind of rational schema and have some consistent rules. There is none of that here. Only the kinetic rush from one action sequence to the next, and where anything connecting, anything requiring the engagement of more than a momentary attention span has been discarded.
Trailer here