The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opened in Japanese theaters a few weeks after its US debut at the start of April. But fans in Japan are not simply watching a dubbed version of the same film. According to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, the Japanese script was essentially rebuilt from the ground up. In an interview with Crank In, Miyamoto explained that the team did not want the Japanese release to feel like a straight localization of the English script.

“Since this is a project made both in Japan and the US, we didn’t want the Japanese version to be just a localization of the English version, we wanted to properly write and craft it in Japanese,” he said.

This is a different approach from the first film, 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, where both the English and Japanese scripts were produced at the same time. With the knowledge gained from that experience, Nintendo and Illumination chose to first complete the English version of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and then fully reconstruct the Japanese version rather than translate it directly.

The Japanese script was handled by Makoto Ueda from the theater group Europe Kikaku, someone Miyamoto describes as a long-time acquaintance. Miyamoto said he wanted the characters to speak in a way that felt natural to Japanese audiences, noting that humor and conversational rhythm do not always carry over well between languages. “Jokes differ between Japan and overseas, so we wanted to make the dialogue feel as natural as possible,” he said.

The approach to voice recording also changed significantly. While the first movie allowed some improvisation from Japanese voice actors, they were still largely expected to stick close to the original script. For the new film, the production team gave actors much more freedom, instructing them to use the visuals on screen as a guide and come up with entertaining dialogue in Japanese on their own. “Since we recorded the scenes with improvisation allowed and then refined them afterward, there’s a lot of care packed into the final product,” Miyamoto said.