"Super Mario Bros: The Great Mission to Save Princess Peach" is a children-oriented anime film made in 1986. It was directed by Masami Hata who also made stuff like "Ringing Bell" and "The Legend of Sirius".However, this film is pretty hard to find. It was only released in Japan at the time it was made. It has not been released in the US at once, making this anime ultra-rare.Short about the beginning: The film begins with Mario playing some video game, until the beautiful Princess Peach suddenly pops out of the TV, only to be kidnapped by Bowser in front of Mario's eyes. So it's later up to the Mario brothers to save her.The film stays very true to the Mushroom Kingdom (Princess Peach's famous home-place), as well as the iconic save-the-princess-plot. The popular enemies like Goombas (Kuribo) and Lakitu (Jugem) are also portrayed well. The only things which bugged me a little bit is the fact Luigi is wearing yellow, not green as he usually does. The characters generally are much better drawn than they were in the US cartoon version made by DIC. And Princess Peach is just so CUTE in this film, compared to how she was in the later cartoon series as Princess Toadstool. These are the reasons for me saying this anime being a lot better than the US cartoon series "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!" made by DIC three years later.It was also interesting to know that Mami Yamase, who voiced as Princess Peach, also sung the touching closing song "I Love You".As I said first in this review, this film is pretty hard to find as it was only released in Japan in 1986. Even in its homeland Japan this anime is a hard find. If you ever get to find this film, then you are lucky. ;-)

Here's a strange one. An early and oddly obscure, animated adaptation of the adventures of the Super Mario Brothers, Mario and Luigi.While this movie's rendition of the Mushroom Kingdom is actually pretty faithful to the original games, featuring almost all the classic enemies, sound effects, tunes and even level elements, it disappoints in all other respects. The quality of the animation is even below that of the already dreadful "Super Mario Bros. Super Show", the characters, rather than acting in accordance with some sort of personality, or at least a few consistent quirks, just keep throwing random emotional fits, the humor annoys with a blend of nonsensical (not to be mistaken with creative) silliness and utterly generic slapstick, and the songs that play throughout the entire thing have brain-meltingly dumb lyrics.All in all, I cannot understand why people are commenting positively on this one. As much as I consider the western Mario cartoons to be nothing but quick and lazy attempts to capitalize on the popularity of the character, I fail to see how this is any better, if not worse.

This is very hard to find, but I found it! Most of the characters have matured in design since Super Mario Bros. the game, released just one year earlier. It seems safe for me to say that with some exceptions, Bowser and Luigi (only because of his color scheme), the characters' designs and personalities are very well developed. Princess Peach is dead on.The story flows nicely throughout, I happen to be someone who thinks that Mario is very hard to write stories for because the games' storyline as a whole is weak and has no cinematic potential. In this case I was treated to a pretty solid story and some weird and sometimes unfitting J-pop.If you're not a die-hard Mario fan, this probably isn't for you. Once you finish watching it, you're gonna want to break out your old NES.

This is the oldest animated Super Mario Bros. Cartoon. And it contains all the elements from the game. The plot is similar to with the whole Mario Bros. travel in Mushroom Kingdom to save Princess Peach from Bowser. Only the story is different.There are minor and secondary characters entirely original for this movie only. Plus it has a few changes like Luigi wearing yellow instead of green, & the Mario Bros. are grocery store owners and not plumbers.Despite all that the movie has a good flow to it as well as some pretty catchy Japanese voice talent. But for only 60 minutes long, there's so much more they could include in this movie.Sadly this is the only existing Mario Bros. anime. And I think it wouldn't hurt to make another one that's done with newer animation. I mean if Pokemon can have a successful anime. Why not the Mario Bros, there's so much value that can make a highly interesting based off of a video game anime.I didn't see this movie till most recently. And it's never been released outside of Japan at all. An English dub is out of the question as very few anime distribution companies would never dub anything this old and out of date animation.The only way it would ever be released is to get it on a sub-only DVD and get permission by Nintendo in doing so.