If you haven’t seen the movie yet, we’re going to talk about something you probably will do not i want to know o ok, now that we got that out of the way, here’s the news…
Spoilers ahead! The Mario Movie features certain characters in Mario’s family tree that we’ve never seen before, including his parents, uncles, aunts, niece, and even his grandfather. So how did this come about?
Speaking to Polygon, animation directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic mentioned that they wanted a family dinner to help set the scene, and Nintendo was “totally open to it” by providing some unreleased sketches to help.
The design of Mario’s “Mom and Dad” ended up looking “very close” to Nintendo’s unused versions. In fact, his father is described in the film as a “one-to-one” design adaptation of the Nintendo original, and Mario’s mother only had “a few” changes to her.
With someone else family members, the film team deviated only “slightly” from the original design.
“It goes back to […] grounding the characters… We wanted to have them at a lively family dinner. So it’s like, Well, we need a bunch of people—who would be there? Mario’s mom and dad. He’s going to have a couple of uncles who were like, you know, cracking his balls. These are his father’s brothers, [Uncle Arthur, played by John DiMaggio, and Uncle Tony, played by Rino Romano]and his aunt Marie.
“Nintendo was totally open to it — they were totally on board with this cinematic presentation of Mario… So they were totally on board with creating this family for Mario… They sent us character sketches that they did years ago they never used..”
