Last week, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:rumors broke that Nintendo is in the final phases of making a deal with Universal for Illumination to make a film based on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zelda. Just from a math standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Super Mario Bros. Movie has made $1.316 billion worldwide to date, and is the third highest-grossing animated film of all-time, behind only The Lion King 'live-action’ remake and Frozen 2. When you knock the ball out of the park on your first try, it makes sense to give the batter another turn at the plate. It's a smart financial strategy, but it would be an abysmal creative choice.
I didn’t hate The Super Mario Bros. Movie by any means. Mario isn’t really a character in the games, the Mushroom Kingdom isn’t really a place, and the most important aspect of the platformers is the joy of jumping. Illumination took the 3D games’ aesthetic, put it on a basic Hero’s Journey structure, and stuffed the movie full of enough Easter Eggs that you could mistake the references for world building. It’s not a deep movie, but Mario isn’t a deep character. Making a bo❀g standard c෴hildren’s movie out of the series works well enough.
That isn’t true of Zelda, for a number of reasons, and it’s a mistake for Ninte🎃ndo to partner with I🐻llumination for every adaptation of an iconic series. Link isn’t Mario, and the Illumination house style, defined by its broad humor, needle drop soundtracks, and effervescent tone, won’t capture what makes Zelda special.
The Zelda games have always had an air of mystery about them, one that runs counter to the easygoing joy of the mainline Mario games. Mario is pretty straightforward. You get dropped into a level and need to run and jump your way to the flag at the end. But the first Zelda was an open-world game before we even had that term, setting Link loose on a hostile world and giving him freedom to go in any direction. It was hands-off to the point of being obtuse, requiring players to bomb random walls and burn down trees in hopes of finding the critical path hiding behind them. Mario has (with notable exceptions like The Lost Levels) always been an accessible series for children, and that's only gotten more true over the years.
The Zelda games, meanwhile, have a stronger atmosphere of menace and a higher degree of difficulty. Ganondorf is actually a villain in a way that Bowser is not. Link and Ganondorf don't play tennis together. The Zelda games are cartoony, with recurring characters like Tingle and the Gorons who bring levity to the games, but there's a strong undercurrent of horror throughout the series, especially in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Majora's Mask and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom. There has never been a Mario game with as dark an aesthetic as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Twilight Princess, and in the past 20 years, there hasn't been a Mario game anywhere as challenging as the early hours of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild.
The Zelda games have often incorporated themes of legend (it’s in the title after all), positioning Link as a hero of myth who recurs throughout time to rescue Hyrule from the forces of evil. Zelda can tell emotional, even tragic, stories, and nothing in Illumination's catalog suggests that it can hit those notes. Few animation houses can, especially in the West. Ghibli could — Tears of the Kingdom's aesthetic even seems to draw heavily from Princess Mononoke and Castle in the Sky — but then again, Ghibli is the most revered animation studio in the world. Illumination isn't Ghibli. Illumination isn't even Pixar or DreamWorks, for that matter. There are studios that have shown the ability to synthesize the mixture of darkness and humor, wonder and challenge, fun and emotion that Zelda contains. Illumination isn't one of them.