The Super Mario Galaxy movie script was rewritten for Japan

Both Super Mario movies have opened in the US, taking several weeks to open in Japan. In fact, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has only been in Japanese theaters for a little over a week, after many of us got it on April 1st.

Now that Japanese fans can watch the movie, there's a good chance that what they're watching is a little different than the footage we got in the English version. That's because the script, according to Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, was completely rewritten for Japan, rather than just localized.

The Super Mario Galaxy movie was not localized in Japan, Miyamoto reveals

Bowser Jr. posed with a brush in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

Miyamota made these comments in an interview with Crank In, translated by Automaton.

“Since this is a project made in both Japan and the US, we didn't want the Japanese version to just be a localization of the English version, we wanted to write and create it properly in Japanese,” says Miyamoto.

He goes on to praise Makoto Ueda, head of theater company Europe Kikaku, who handled the Japanese script.

“I want Mario and company to talk with the kind of natural dialogue you hear in one of them [Europe Kikaku’s] stage productions, but localization tends to change the rhythm of conversation,” explains Miyamoto. “Jokes differ between Japan and overseas, so we wanted to make the dialogue feel as natural as possible.”

This is a much more dramatic approach than we see with other media, such as video games. Here, audiences often push back against cross-regional rewrites, especially when Japanese games are broadcast in English. However, localization is so important to get right, as direct translations often do not work and will lose the intended meaning. But as Miyamoto points out, another option is to just start from scratch, building the script separately and not worrying about matching the intent of the original.

That being said, the story will have to follow the same general beats wherever it opens in the case of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. That's because Miyamoto has also said that Peach's lore established in the movie will also be canon for the games. Yes, that means Peach and Rosalina are sisters going forward.