The trailer for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, sequel to Illumination’s 3D-Animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie, just came out last week and I already have thoughts.
I can’t tell if this sequel will spawn as much confusion, vitriol, and doom as its predecessor. Last time around, people assumed that the first 3D Mario movie was the end of animation and cinema itself. If anything, I think it will quietly pass by, lost in the current of a tidal wave of other movies, mostly mediocre ones. Maybe it’ll bring back the trend of the 3D-Animated kids movies that were both abundant and must-sees when I was growing up in the 2010s.
Yet, my worries and issues aren’t about the success of the movie itself. Rather, how will it portray its female characters? Princess Rosalina will be featured this time around and from what I’ve already seen and heard, I have fears.
The first movie
In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Princess Peach is completely different from her video game counterpart. As a refresher, typically, Peach in the Mario games is gentle and soft-spoken with her high-pitched voice. She’s known for, aside from being kidnapped, taking walks, being beautiful, and baking cakes. Combined with her being a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed princess in a pink dress, it seems like Peach is the culmination of sexist stereotypes. Another basic princess without any agency, if you exclude certain Mario series and her own spin-off games. In the film, she was taken in by the toads, given martial arts training, and excels in physical challenges, leadership tactics, and is able to succeed any physical challenge. All with a gritty tough-girl attitude that has no time for romance and is instead replaced with an adventurous spirit.
On the surface, it seems like a nice way to modernize Peach’s character, to make her feminist and not prey to any of her usual flaws. She becomes a capable leader and has the skills to handle any situation she’s in. Yet…she still gets kidnapped by Bowser. And throughout the movie, Mario, while lacking Peach’s abilities and knowledge, still has to protect her throughout. This sends mixed messages about women in power, that they are always unaware and actually need men to think and act for them. That’s not even the major issue. In this complete transformation, Peach’s actual character is erased. Gone is her kindness, her gentle ways, and her love of traditionally feminine things, like flowers and baking! The things that made Peach herself and made her so beloved to not only her people, but her real-life fans are gone!
The Problem with Peach
It’s genuinely hard for me to write this because the Princess Peach in the film is the one I always dreamed of as a little girl. I questioned why she couldn’t possibly be tough enough to take down her foes or at least outwit them. Characters like her were what I yearned for! Yet, there’s another side to that. When it’s posed and marketed that abandoning feminine traits, hobbies, and attitudes is progressive, those things become vilified. That framework shows that the feminine makes people weak. Princess Peach becomes a weak character because of her femaleness, and within the world of Mario…it’s hard to say otherwise. Growing up, this messaging was so strong and it caused me to abandon parts of myself that I felt were feminine because femininity was always portrayed as a weak trait. This is the same issue with the Mario movies. In having to bring a character like Peach to life, someone who embodies the stereotypical traits that appear to set women back, a character with little agency of her own in public discourse, they have to find a way to make her presentable to modern, widespread audiences. The easiest way to do that is to strip her of what made her feminine. Take away the serene, demure looks and replace them with creased eyebrows and wide, determined grins. No more flowers and turnips, Peach seizes flags better than the best of them, and always speaks boldly in her loud, deep voice.
But that is not who Princess Peach is, and denying those qualities of hers, it’s partially denying the fact that Peach’s character even matters. For young girls sold on this new image of Peach, it’s a form of betrayal to play the games and find out she is not always this incredibly gifted trailblazer. Either way, for the audience, it leads to this despise of the feminine, something the media loves to feed into, from early cartoons of corset slander to modern-day politicians berating women for being themselves.
The sequel: Rosalina
The issue seems to solely reside with Peach, who has a mixed reception at best. What about a female character who always had a positive reception, like Rosalina?
Rosalina, in the games, is much like Peach. A woman of transient beauty and soft-spoken. While her hobbies of reading and astronomy are less stereotypically feminine, they aren’t very progressive either. She performs these in domestic settings, and her most prominent role is being a mother to the Lumas.
Rosalina was viewed as progressive in the late 2000s because she didn’t need to be rescued or explained. She was beautifully enigmatic, and that was her appeal. Video game women in that era often fell into limited roles, the ‘easily could have been a man’, ‘beautiful (usually royal or magical) mysterious girl’, and the basic ‘princess to be saved’. She still falls into a stereotypical role and serves as an archetype of the divine female guide. While the pushback isn’t as strong towards Rosalina, Hollywood is still bent to change her character. How could they possibly suggest that a powerful young woman is a mother? Think of how regressive that would be to young girls! And I agree, since we truly are long past an era where playing at motherhood was an encouraged part of girlhood. Even conservatives might find such a thing backwards and regressive…yet, it’s also crucial to Rosalina’s character. She is a young woman searching for her family, and in the process, makes one in place of the one she doesn’t have.
What we already know about Rosalina from the film is that she is voiced by Brie Larson, supposed raging feminist according to conservative media, with that same deeper tough-girl voice. As a fellow woman with an unusually deep voice, I have nothing against that…but I can’t help but wonder about how that will change Rosalina. While it certainly makes her more relatable, does making an almost goddess-like figure more relatable and believable diminish her power?
From the trailer footage, her own gentleness is similarly being removed, as she rushes to attack Bowser in the first trailer, conjuring destruction with her magic wand, and walking slowly away from an explosion. She, like Peach, has become the brave, overpowered tough girl. It’s a far cry from her caring guide role she originally played. Lumas were nowhere to be seen, though there are clips of her with them circling around social media, likely leaked from the Nintendo Direct on the film.
Rosalina is going to be active, that’s certain. But what will that change about her character? What message does removing her mystery, since her and Peach’s origins will be explained in this sequel, give to the audience? That women have to be explained and need a deeper reason to appear?
The Culture Wars
It doesn’t help that these films are coming out and being produced during a time when there’s been a massive shift in culture, back to the conservatism many women thought they escaped from. Just as films like Barbie were coming out and more nuance came to being a woman, a feminist, and feminine entered pop culture, they quickly left with the rise of the Trad-Wife, softgirl, S.A.G, and an entire conservative shift towards women. Media outlets are now being flooded with messaging about how women are better off being dependent on a man, that they need to be less powerful and instead more quiet and more beautiful. This idea of a woman’s role is directly tied to femininity, painting it as the only way women should be.
This shift undoes so much progress women have made and takes us back to the start of the feminist movement, where the feminine was demonized as a mode of oppression, that the only way to be progressive was to be masculine. An idea that once sounds so outdated, but now…that’s the square we’re back at. It feels like the only way to stand up to this rhetoric is to be exactly what the Trad-Wives dread, the masculine woman who denies her femininity for power. That’s the only outlet even something like the Mario movies have, and they too have faced criticism for their very basic treatment of female characters in trying to make them feminist.
We see this done by Hollywood time and time again. These characters have shaped our ideas of what being a woman is, and while it’s bold enough to let the princesses keep their dresses, it says a lot about our world when it’s taboo for a character to even be feminine.
These may just be kids movies based on a family-friendly video game series, but the choices that are made with these films reflect our culture and where femininity can even stand in the culture wars of today.