What do we actually want from a Mario movie?

Look, it’s not necessarily Illumination’s fault that we associate their output with a lot of dumb, puerile jokes about bodily functions. Since its inception, the studio has been following the Dreamworks playbook to a T, and that includes giving the 6-year-olds in the audience something to giggle at while their parents grove to old Monkees songs. That being said—and at the risk of going off on a tangent about, like, the dignity of Super Mario—we would love it if this movie could take its storytelling seriously enough to not include a joke about Mario or his buddy Toad farting or pooping or peeing on something. Please?We will grant one exception, of course: Wario, if he appears, . It would be folly to ask him not to.

This one feels like an impossibility, given Pratt’s track record and modern animation’s overall trends and the necessity of soundtrack sales, etc., but we have to at least ask: Can we please skip the bit where all the characters do a big dance number at the end of the movie? We get that it’s fun, and it gets the little kids clapping, and also stops you from having to write an actual ending for your movie. But we’re pretty sure we will die if we have to watch Mario breakdance to “Party Rock Anthem” or whatever. We’ll die, Nintendo. Don’t do this to us.

This is, ultimately, the big one. It’s the reason Pratt’s casting has made us nervous; it’s the reason making a Mario movie in the first place has always seemed like such a daunting prospect. Because main characters in movies have to have a personality, and Mario … doesn’t?That’s not even a burn! For a video game character like Mario—who exists almost entirely to just be a player avatar to run and jump through all of Nintendo’s beautiful, goofy worlds—any kind of personality would mostly serve as a distraction or a demerit. (Nobody needs to hear Mario yell “Eat feet!” after every third Goomba he stomps into mushroom paste.) But the Mario in the movie can’t work like that: He’s going to have to have a viewpoint, and an arc, and be, well, a person. The trailer suggests we’ll be doing the fish-out-of-water thing of him being a recent transplant to the Mushroom Kingdom, so we’re expecting a fair amount of “guy confused by the weird stuff around him.” But ultimately, this is all going to come down to the writing, and to Pratt: They have to make Mario a compelling character to spend time with, which is literally something that his video games have never had to do. It’s a daunting prospect, and we just don’t get enough of the character in the trailer to suggest how well it’ll be tackled.