Super Mario Over the Years! 2E

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Rating Details

This animation is a sequel to my very first hand-drawn animation. This time around, I used a Huion drawing tablet instead of drawing with purely a mouse. The quality is quite a bit different . . . maybe I'll need to remake the first at some point . . .

Check out the original animation here, if you haven't seen it yet: Super Mario Over the Years! 1 - Unfortunately, you'll have to watch it on YT because I didn't have a NG account back then :(

Isn't it technically the 41st now of Super Mario Bros?: Lol, yes - this project is a culmination of short vids I've been putting out during the 40th anniversary across my socials, plus a bunch more! I still wanted to call this an animation for the 40th, as it's the bigger milestone year than the 41st. I also just work slowly, and had a bunch of ideas, causing the release time to continuously get pushed back.

Art Direction

I've had the thought for quite some time to make a more faithful animation to the Mario series to emulate and honor the stylistic choices of Yōichi Kotabe and Shigehisa Nakaue. My decision on the art direction also came down to me wanting to "understand the generations of Mario” from its official art standpoint. Furthermore, I wanted to embellish some of Mario's movements, not limited to the games, to give a greater sense of action and adventure! I referenced all types of official cover art, licensed activity books, instruction manuals, classic 80s/90s commercials and other promotional material for the games and time periods. It took way more effort than my past simpler, often rough character animations - but it was totally worth it!

For later games in the franchise, including games like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Odyssey Characters, I choose to fuse the official render designs with the linework used in the manual art in the earlier games. I wanted the animation to have the hand drawn feel, but still have the evolution of Mario's design aimed to hit several of the "key poses" from the Super Mario Bros official art, and “bring them to life” in the animation. In order to execute this idea, I started with several of the key frames as these key poses, with some adjustments (like eye movements, hand placements, or perspective tweaks) to flow with the animation.

As far as the backgrounds go, they involve a stylistic approach to Shigehisa Nakaue's work on the fairly consistent Nintendo summer artwork. I tried to simulate this by blending some watercolor texture scans I painted with digital watercolor brushes created in Photoshop to create laying and show a brush stroke on a more rough, coarse paper.

The color usage references the internal colors displayed when playing the games on their respective consoles. This challenged me when it came to using a very monochromatic color scheme in Super Mario Land's Birabuto dungeon to quite the opposite of using a wide array of color in Mario's character animation in the Super Mario Odyssey segment.

Easter Eggs

Woah, you actually read up to this point? Okay, well, I'll let you in on a little secret: this animation is jam packed with a ton of hidden secrets/collectables. Try to spot the following:

• Bosses and/or friendly side characters from each game
• References to different Nintendo game console generations
• 5 cherries to give you "invincibility"
• 2 wonder seeds for a "sense of curiosity"
• Franchise game/console codenames
• A bunch of coins. Count all of them if you dare and they may reveal some meaningful Mario number lol . . . The following are variations of coins and values associated with them (does their final value mean anything?):

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀◦ Regular/Gold Coin - Simply 1 Coin

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀◦ Red Coin (SM64) - 1 Red Coin = 2 Coins

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀◦ Blue Coin (SM64) - 1 Blue Coin = 5 Coins

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀◦ Purple Regional Coin (SMO) - 1 Regional Coin = 2 Coins

Credits

Music in chronological order:

0:00 ~ Super Mario Bros 2. - Ground Theme ~ Super Smash Bros. Ultimate OST

0:23 ~ Super Mario Land - Underground Theme ~ Super Smash Bros. Brawl OST

0:39 ~ Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins - Main Theme ~ Mario Kart World OST

0:53 ~ Throwback Galaxy (Bob-omb Battlefield SMG2 Rendition) ~ Super Mario Galaxy 2 OST

1:04 ~ Wing/Invisibility Cap Theme ~ Super Mario 64 OST

1:19 ~ Jump Up, Super Star! ~ Super Mario Odyssey OST

1:39 ~ Overworld Theme ~ Super Mario Bros. Wonder OST

1:49 ~ Super Mario Victory Theme ~ Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Super Smash Bros Melee (Mash-up)

1:55 ~ Super Mario Bros. Game Over ~ Super Mario All-Stars OST

Composers: Koji Kondo, Hirokazu Tanaka, Koji Hayama, Atsuko Asahi, Mahito Yokota, Naoto Kubo, Shiho Fujii, Hideki Sakamoto

Music, sounds, and characters belong to Nintendo.