Here Is Chris Pratt’s Mario Movie Voice

Nintendo just had a special Direct where Shigeru Miyamoto debuted the first trailer for the film and its A-list Hollywood voice cast. Unlike most animated features where it’s common to stack up big names in the credits, given that these are characters we’ve already heard voiced for decades now in some form or another, and some of the biggest icons in gaming, this was…a different animal.

Jack Black as Bowser, sure, I can see that. Charlie Day as Luigi? Yeah, makes sense. But all anyone wanted to see was how Chris Pratt was going to handle his Mario voicework, and how he would adapt Mario’s famously pronounced Italian accent for the film.

This first trailer is not all that long, and features a lot more Bowser voicework than Mario’s (and Jack Black is great, from what it sounds like). Pratt only actually has two lines, one when we arrives and one when he bounds off after Toad.

The first line makes it sound like he’s not really doing an accent at all. It sounds kind of just like, normal Chris Pratt voice, like he’s leading the LEGO Movie again. But the second line, you can hear more of what I’ll call an “Italian uncle from the Bronx” accent, where he’s how you might imagine a real life, Italian-heritage plumber in the US. So, it’s kind of faithful to the concept, but it’s also miles away from Charles Martinet’s famous whooping and “It’s-a me-a!”-ing. But I suppose that might have been necessary for something like a feature. Honestly, it’ll probably be fine.

The trailer is…quite good, I’d argue. The humor looks on point, as Bowser storms a penguin ice city to be pelted by snowballs before he flames down its gates. We got a little bit from Keegan-Michael Key’s Toad, and a few yelps from Charlie Day’s Luigi as an end teaser. We didn’t see Anya Taylor-Joy’s Peach as of yet. Seth Rogen is somewhere in here as Donkey Kong too, I guess.

I mean, this is probably going to be good. Given how intimately Miyamoto has tied himself to this project, I feel like we’re not going to have a repeat of the famously disastrous live-action movie decades ago, and this is probably going to destroy the box office when it arrives this upcoming April. I certainly wouldn’t bet against it, Pratt-based controversies aside.

This feels like it will be the first step in Nintendo turning more and more IPs into multimedia projects, following an industry trend that is now churning out game-based TV shows and movies and animated series at an increased frequency. Reportedly a Legend of Zelda live action series on Netflix was cancelled after news of it was leaked, but I’m guessing we’ll see one someday regardless, especially if Mario does well here. It’s a new era for Nintendo starting this April, mark my words.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.