Kiddo and I went to go see this at the library, and in the few minutes before they actually hit play, whoever was running the event played some of the Blu-ray special features to tide us over. One of them was about all of the “easter eggs” we were going to see in the movie. This annoyed me a bit, because if I’d heard one thing about the movie, it’s that it was stuffed full of (perhaps gratuitous) Nintendo references, and I don’t think it’s an “easter egg” if the movie is built around hitting you over the head with reference after reference after reference.

Indeed, that’s what much of the movie was, and while it delighted kiddo, I can’t say that it impressed me. Does Mr. Game and Watch have to appear in the climax of a Mario movie? The entire plot felt constructed around making as many Nintendo in-jokes (and by “in-jokes” I mean mostly obvious references, though I missed a number of them, too), and, well, meh.

It feels weird to give this the same rating that I gave Toy Story 5, because while I was disappointed with that movie, it at least tried to be meaningful in a way that I’m not sure this one did. That said, I’m cutting it some slack because I think what the movie set out to accomplish was to make kids like mine happy, and it worked at that! There were also some genuinely fun jokes and references that I actually enjoyed, despite going into it expecting to be grumpy.

The animation is also good, though (like Toy Story 5, though I don’t think I mentioned it in that review) that kind of annoyed me, actually. There were some parts (especially the ending credits) that felt like attempts to show off what Illumination knows how to do with animation, and while it’s technically impressive, I feel like generative AI has soured me on “hey, look what we can do” tech demonstrations, even when they’re cool. It got me thinking about how little some of the characters spoke, and how little the voice actors probably needed to spend in the studio to collect their checks. It’s a movie largely built around IP and not necessarily around humans, since animation lets you invoke a character without needing to put a human behind it. In a weird way, it made me want to listen to more radio dramas.

This is way more than I expected to write, and I’m confident I’m overthinking this review, so it’s time to save this post and publish it.

• The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
• video games
• Super Mario Bros.
• Toy Story 5