It Sounds Like Donald Glover Really Wanted To Be Yoshi (Good for Him)

My kids were two years old when The Super Mario Bros. Movie came out. So, they were still too small for me to take them to a theater. I could have! When my wife and I saw Sausage Party at 9:45 on a Tuesday night, someone brought a (maybe) 1-year-old baby and several other small children. People get wild when it comes to animated movies. Still, I waited, and we finally watched the movie this year and honestly had a blast and a half, which I was not expecting.

I’m not going to pretend the movie is some masterpiece, but I had a lot of fun with it, and its quality was much better than many of the children’s movies I have watched over the last couple of years. The animation is really impressive, the voice acting is fun (I know), the laughs are pretty big (my kids lose their minds at the training montage), and it feels like it’s trying to talk to kids, not down to them. So, I’ve been keeping an eye on the sequel and laughing every time a new voice actor gets announced.

I don’t think anyone does a bad job, and some people, like Jack Black, are (unsurprisingly) dialed in to a point that feels infectious. But there were certainly some instances that felt… surprising. At the end of the day, most of the people lending their voices to this film are celebrities. Yet, there are some instances where the person’s voice is run through some kind of filter or modulator, like Keegan Michael Key, and at that point, what does it matter who is voicing that character?

There was (rightfully) a lot of this kind of talk around Chris Pratt’s casting, because everyone assumed he would just sound like himself. I was surprised that he actually kind of tries something, though. A trained voice actor could have done something better, but I expected to like Pratt a lot less than I did. Regardless, the movie does no favors for the “why aren’t you hiring people who do voice acting for a living?” question. Especially not when you are getting someone like Donald Glover to voice Yoshi and he just… sounds like Yoshi.

I love me some Donald Glover! And I will happily be seated for the new movie, likely after I fly out to Oklahoma to see family next week (pray for Mojo). But, any clip I’ve seen with the character just sounds like his voice run through some kind of Yoshi filter or something. They could have just taken clips from the video game. Maybe something will change in the movie, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense until you learn that Glover campaigned for the role.

According to his co-star, Jack Black, Glover loves the Mushroom Kingdom and made it his mission to voice the green dinosaur. “It’s kind of a cool thing. We got lucky that we got Brie, who crushes it and loves Nintendo universe. And also Donald, who campaigned for the role,” Black explained to the folks at ExtraTV (via Deadline). “He told his agent, ‘Call [Illumination CEO] Chris Meledandri. Tell him I really want to be Yoshi, I’d love to be in the new Super Mario Bros. Because he loves it, and he loves that universe.”

Okay, fine! I think that’s fun. I’ve always thought that Glover was one step removed from Troy Barnes anyway, and this more or less proves that. He’s a big old nerd who wanted to go have fun making silly noises. Or, ya know, he wanted that stanky Nintendo cash. I’d be fine with either.