Mario Saga 2

Rarely have I seen a project more of two minds than Mario Saga 2, where HMC spent four years trying different ways to fuse his Merlitar story with the Mario universe. Now we get a compliation of woefully unfinished and unpolished work, totalling what appears to be less than 15% of the movie's runtime, and it's still not clear this idea could've ever worked in a way that felt fluid and natural. Both halves of the movie suffer for lack of a way to make them work together; the first time I watched the unfinished footage, I felt like HMC was infinitely more interested in the Merlitar story, but this time around there was something uncomfortable about both. There are great scenes, beautiful scenes, funny scenes in Mario Saga 2, but an awkwardness permeates all of them, betraying HMC's lack of confidence in how to make it all work. Because in the end, what he wants to do is create a project, not tell a story. The story is there so that the project can exist, reluctantly and uncomfortably dragging its feet through every single frame.

It's all the more bittersweet because it looks like nothing 3DMM has ever seen before. He's easily blown my v3dmm stuff out of the water. I've said numerous times that HMC has an eye for color and composition that surpasses any single director the community has ever had. That's on evidence here as much as anywhere. It seems effortless, the way constructs a scene out of soft blue tones and then cuts it with a greenish-yellow light that hangs on the edges of each object's silhouette. Or the way indistinct forms made of solid-color greens just on the edge of black form a dense forest canopy in a nighttime scene. An above-average shadow scene in 3DMM would have characters made out of solid black with a given color lighting the edge of their bodies. HMC hits them with one color to the front and a contrasting color from the side or behind. That's pretty damn advanced, and impressive.

Color is his biggest strength, but composition and detail are in no small showing here either. His scenery is composed so that it reinforces his color choices and vice-versa. The city in the Merlitar section is obviously constructed to form interesting complimentary angles. Buildings are a series of rectangles offset by position and size, coming off the screen as a larger form, but continuing the detail down to the micro level like a series of fractals. The nighttime forest scene outside of Sylvia's house for the first time gives us the tree branch as the largest stable element, then effortlessly layers leaf clusters on top of each other, stretching back to suggest depth that's nearly impossible to provide in 544x306 resolution. And while I have issues with his animation that I'll get to in a moment, the details stand out as the kind of secondary visual information even the best animators leave behind as missed opportunities. Look at the way Sylvia's hair gently sways underwater, or Merlitar observes tiny water particles floating past his head, or Toad puts on reading glasses. He has a keen eye for supplemental details that often make a scene, but it's implementing them into a whole where the movie suffers.

HMC has said before that he doesn't like to animate, and it's easy to see that here. He has the ability to animate, but not the patience to do it in a way that lives up to his lofty ideals. He knows how bodies should move, and where things should go, and how force attached to one obejct can influence another, but the timing is frequently off. He cuts corners and uses more (and sometimes less) frames than necessary, so things tend to come across as servicable when they should be engaging. In a world that looks this good, impact and motion should be natural. He has a good understanding of particle effect and movement, but it usually comes across as competent when it should be excellent. I often felt like something was missing.

The two storylines have different problems stemming from different things. In the Mario story, HMC has constructed a series of anecdotal events not leading anywhere. Only the "briefing scene" has any connection the supposed main plotline, and it's mostly structured around the sketch joke at the end. Otherwise, we see Mario and Toad getting into zany adventures, with Mario being little more than a mute puppet who acts as Toad's straight man. I know there wasn't much of a chance to develop this plotline given what's available here, but I also suspect that their plotline didn't get much more development than this. HMC seems to be utterly stuck on what to do with these characters, but can't lose them because the Merlitar stuff doesn't stand on its own.

And on some level he had to know the Merlitar stuff doesn't stand on its own, because at various points throughout the flashback sequence (which is longer than everything else put together), there are a lot of little moments that betray his lack of confidence in the story. HMC has a tendency to dip into self-parody when he should be working to uphold the story's atmosphere -- look at Merlitar's eyes bugging in a overly comedic way when the branch breaks, or the way some of the animation is done in a kind of rushed, slapstick way. Mario Saga 2 is constantly unsure of what its tone is, unwilling to take itself seriously long enough to get us through an obviously serious sequence. The flashback scene meanders as HMC wants to embellish the details of Merlitar and Sylvia's relationship and spends far too much time in single moments. He wants to create a genuine drama, establish complex characters, immerse himself in these details, but he also wants Merlitar's story to serve as the plot device for Mario's, and he wants the world to be able to not take itself too seriously, and he wants to do a Mario story with a epic-lite narrative thread, and the movie gets twisted up in itself and falls the hell down on its face as a result.

It's hard to know what to say about a project like this, because in the end it is a project and not a movie. The decision to release it as a small collection of files is perplexing, as the individual parts are significantly less than the whole; compiling it into a movie with some kind of transitions or explanations could've given us a clearer idea of where this was going. I found the individual pieces more impressive than Rayman, and the narrative goals were loftier and more complex by a large factor, but as HMC ultimately wasn't sure what to make of them, the end result is more muddled. The sheer splendor of what's on display helps to distract from a sorely incomplete experience, but it's about as incomplete and disparate as unfinished movies get. Properly edited, with just a little bit more effort into making a singular experience, and watching it could've been 10 times more fun.

I wouldn't say HMC dropped the ball here (except perhaps on the compilation, which is sorely lacking), because hell if I knew how to connect all these ideas into a single film either. Mario Saga 2 is beautiful, perplexing, and depressing.

Personal Score: 57/100.

[HMC]

I think you hit the nail on the head. Thanks for the review, dude.