Voicing Mario in a movie is an impossible task

polygon.com:

Before we rush to criticize Chris Pratt for giving Mario what sounds like his regular speaking voice — or The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s producers for employing him — we should stop and think: What would we have done? Do we really want to listen to a whole film of Charles Martinet going “woohoo” in falsetto and putting on a cartoonishly thick Italian accent? Of course not. But what would we replace it with?

The actor, and the producers, are in a tough spot. Mario is an icon, one of the most recognizable characters of all time. He is the reason the movie is getting made. But he is also its biggest problem, because he’s a cipher. Apart from being Italian and, supposedly, a plumber, he has few character traits. He rarely has what you would call dialogue. Most of his games barely have storylines. He’s a bit of a daredevil, I guess? He always seems to be enjoying himself? He jumps a lot? Before he was called Mario, his name was Jumpman, and that says a lot. It was always going to be necessary to reinvent Mario for him to carry a movie.

This is not to denigrate Shigeru Miyamoto’s creation. The artist, trying to come up with a character who would animate vividly within a tiny grid of pixels in the original Donkey Kong arcade game, came up with something indelible: the red and the blue, the overalls so you could see his arms swing, the hat, the big nose, the mustache. There’s more than just necessity being the mother of invention here, too, as Miyamoto’s playfulness and gentle, impish subversion come into play. His hero looks like anything but: a cute but dumpy little everyman, defiantly unhip, and coded simultaneously as a toddler and a particularly boring species of adult.

Most of all, though, Mario is fun to play with. This is