Rocky Morton’s work with Annabel Jankel has an appetite for strange screen worlds that we admire. In Super Mario Bros., though, that inventiveness cannot compensate for thin characters, muddled storytelling and jokes that do not land.
Fi1m perspective
The people in Super Mario Bros. (1993) are less interesting than the places they inhabit. Production designer David L. Snyder gives the film inventive sets, and co-directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel deserve credit for attempting something peculiar within a family adventure. But it is a poor film, too difficult to follow and too short of good jokes. We were bored by the muddled storytelling, even while the surroundings kept drawing our attention. Morton’s visual curiosity is worth taking seriously; this film gives us much less reason to trust him with characters.
His early work was in animation and experimental films in the late 1970s, followed by music videos and commercials made with Jankel. The mixing of live action, animation and early computer-generated imagery became a distinguishing habit. Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future (1985), which he co-created and directed, gave that interest in visual invention a character to centre on. The move into features came with D.O.A. (1988), co-directed with Jankel and remaking the 1950 film noir. By Super Mario Bros., the challenge was sustaining a strange fantasy for 105 minutes.
The failure there needs to be kept specific. Morton and Jankel aim for a busy fantasy, but thin characters leave us with little to care about while we try to follow the story. A family adventure needs pleasures beyond the chance to inspect its production design, and the comedy repeatedly lets them down. Studio interference and script rewrites troubled the production, which makes it unfair to assign every fault to the directors. Knowing that does not make the jokes any funnier.
After Super Mario Bros., Morton moved primarily into commercials through MJZ, founded in 1989, where David Zander was a production partner. He later returned to painting and occasional short films. We would not use one disappointing feature to dismiss work across so many forms. Morton’s willingness to make something odd remains worth encouraging, even when we cannot recommend the result. For Super Mario Bros., bring an interest in production design and modest expectations of being entertained.
Biography
Rocky Morton is an English director, animator and painter. He co-created the character Max Headroom with Annabel Jankel and George Stone, directing the 1985 television film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. With Jankel he co-directed the feature film D.O.A. (1988).
Morton and Jankel directed Super Mario Bros. (1993). He has directed numerous music videos, including for Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, George Harrison and Miles Davis. Since the mid-1990s he has focused on television commercials through the production company MJZ and works as a painter, with pieces held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
