Super Mario Bros Movie Director Says VA’s Like Chris Pratt Add More “Personality” To Roles

In the world of voice acting, it’s much harder than you would think to get into it and be good at it. You might think it’s just “reading your lines into a microphone, but it’s not. You have to try and match your voice to the animation so that the lip-syncing is close or on point. You must also ensure you have a consistent voice for your character and are emoting in the right scenes. That’s why many people call out when they feel a voice actor isn’t doing a good job, like with the Super Mario Bros Movie.

From the outset, fans were worried about some of the actors attached to the famous video game character roles. But the biggest one is Chris Pratt. When the first trailer dropped, fans’ fears were justified on the Pratt front because despite the promises of a “new Mario voice,” it was just Chris Pratt’s voice.

The film’s director, Michael Jelenic, had a discussion with Animation Magazine about the top-tier talent of the film and made some curious notes about why they are the “perfect voice actors” for the job:

“Sometimes in the animation community people think that you can’t use celebrities, but I think it’s easy to forget that these are great performers and they’ve all proven themselves multiple times and created iconic characters. We cast them in the parts because we believed they could bring these video game characters, who really don’t have much of a personality, to life and make them relatable and funny and heroic. Literally every single person in this movie is great.

Chris Pratt is great at playing an everyman who’s funny, but that you also buy as a hero. Charlie Day is the perfect embodiment of what you think of as Luigi. And then you have Jack Black playing Bowser — and we decided to make that character scary, but the other side of Bowser is somebody who’s vulnerable and funny, and Jack is able to play both those parts and make it not seem like two different characters. It’s sort of humbling working with this talent.”

The line about the characters “not having much personality” in the games will rub gamers the wrong way. Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Bowser have all been shown to have personalities in the games. That’s why fans aren’t happy with how Mario sounds, because it sounds like they “took a celebrity and threw him into the role.”

We’ll find out who is right when the Super Mario Bros Movie arrives on Aprile 5th.