Mario Travels Through Real-Life Tokyo
I think the world is ready for some healing. We’re ready to forgive and forget… about that awful Super Mario Bros. movie from 1993. We’re past the 20 year mark, and there have been some great Mario-themed fan films recently. A few months ago we posted a CG/live-action fan-made short that our readers seemed to love (it also now has over 1 million hits on YouTube). Here’s another great fan film that places a CG Mario in the real world. This doesn’t have the same hilariously destructive outcome as the other film, but the CG in this is much better. The video is a fan trailer by Japan-based visual effects artist Dean Wright that features Mario rushing through Tokyo to get to the Super Smash Bros. tournament.
From the looks of the trailer released yesterday, the new SpongeBob Squarepants movie is perhaps the first promising looking CG/live-action hybrid film. I don’t know what it is about that extra dimension, but most other 3D hybrid films have yet to live up to their 2D ancestors, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam. Maybe there's a writing team out there who could find the right balance and scenario, which the SpongeBob movie seems to have done, for a CG Mario to be in the real world. But, if we’re looking for a gritty live-action take on the plumber, Evan Daugherty’s Four Players series gave us a fantastic taste of what that could be like.