”This is Miyamoto.”
All things considered, it’s not surprising that the upcoming CG Super Mario movie has been delayed from its previously announced December 2022 release. Predicting creative workflow months in advance is tricky enough in the best of times, let alone a pandemic. There’s also no doubt plenty of pressure on the staff to not screw things up like what happened with the infamous 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros. movie, especially with the two recent Sonic the Hedgehog films both having managed to keep audiences happy and buying tickets.
So it’s understandable that the Mario producers want to take all the time they feel the movie needs. What is weird, though, is how Nintendo itself broke the news through the official Nintendo of America Twitter account.
It’s a strangely written message in a whole bunch of ways, starting with the blunt “This is Miyamoto,” relying on readers to fill in the “Shigeru” part of Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s name. “After consulting with Chris-san, my partner at Illumination,” assumes that anyone reading will make the connection with Illumination producer Chris Meledandri (as opposed to voice-of-Mario-to-be Chris Pratt), and creates the awkward imbalance between “Miyamoto” (family name) and “Chris” (given name) (though the lack of -san on Miyamoto is fine, since you don’t use -san when speaking about yourself). Even “we decided to move the global release to Spring 2023-April 28 in Japan and April 7 in North America” is a bit of a headscratcher, since it mentions the movie’s “global release,” but then gives the dates for only two regions, leaving us wondering if the other parts of the world will get to see the movie on April 7, April 28, or some other day.
The whole thing is unnatural-sounding enough that you’d be forgiven for assuming the announcement is a hoax posted by someone who hacked the Nintendo of America Titter account, but Meledandri, through Illumination’s account, also posted an announcement of the film’s delay.
For what it’s worth, Nintendo of Japan’s tweet about the delay is exactly the same as its American division’s, starting with “Miyamoto desu/This is Miyamoto.”
It sounds a little less jarring in Japanese, since using family names only is pretty common in the Japanese business world, but it’s still sort of unusual for Miyamoto to be, ostensibly, personally posting through the company account with hardly any more preamble than Mario shouting “It’s a-me!”
Source: Twitter/@NintendoAmerica
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