Is the Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s Rosalina Reveal Canon?

Warning: This post will contain spoilers… inasmuch as The Super Mario Galaxy Movie can be spoiled.

If I had to review the new Mario movie succinctly, it would be as follows: exhausting but colorful, and with superfluous Wart content while also somehow not enough Wart content. That’s it. I think it’s overall a more entertaining thing to watch than the first movie was, but it’s also less interested in plot, character development and giving things a reason for happening. But if you don’t feel conflicted lowering your brain function to only the level needed to recognize things, you might have a decent time. 

I mean it literally when I say The Super Mario Galaxy didn’t bother with traditional narratives. I don’t think a single character had an actual arc. And things just happen because they need to happen, to the point that Toad at one point comments on this, complaining that Yoshi has joined the group for no apparent reason. But because the film seems to avoid the kind of structure you’d expect from most movie plots, I was surprised that it did attempt to fill in the blanks regarding a question that the games have never answered: Why does Rosalina look so much like Peach if they’re not related?

In this new movie, it turns out they are. Rosalina is somehow Peach’s older sister, even if their origins beyond that are explained with only a single line: they’re “made of stardust,” although we’re never explained exactly what this means. It’s not much, I will admit, but it’s certainly more of an explanation than we’ve been given before. The games leave it more or less at Peach being the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom and Rosalina being some kind of mystical space lady who sometimes displays god-like powers and who also has Peach’s face.

And yes, I realize that Daisy already existed in the Super Mario games as a princess who looked like Peach for years before Rosalina came along. But I’d wager Daisy now looks less like Peach or Rosalina than Peach or Rosalina look like each other.

In an interview with Forbes about the production of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Shigeru Miyamoto explained that while it explores Peach and Rosalina’s relationship in a way the games don't, the kernel of this big plot twist is something that originated nearly twenty years ago. It came about during the development of the video game Super Mario Galaxy, but not a whiff of it made it into the game in any meaningful way.

When we were developing Super Mario Galaxy, the director for that game, Yoshiaki Koizumi, and I were discussing what Rosalina and Peach’s actual relationship was. We had this vague idea about what their actual relationship could be, and how it would play into the concept of space. We had a lot of discussion about this, but we never came to a conclusion. So we decided that let’s take this opportunity to give this idea some meat and get into the specificity of it, and we had a lot of fun having this discussion back and forth.

I will point out that Miyamoto isn’t saying that Nintendo specifically intended Rosalina to be Peach’s sister. In fact, there’s a note in the Prima guide to Super Mario Galaxy that makes it seem like the team only took it as far as making Rosalina some kind of relative without specifying which: “In the early stages, we contemplated the idea that Rosalina was related to Princess Peach, so that is why their features are very similar.”

Of course, as I pointed out in a post about connections between Rosalina and Glinda from The Wizard of Oz, one of the original designs for the former dressed a lot more like the latter — and with a dress that looked a lot more like the standard princess gown that Peach and Daisy wear.

It’s interesting that this new character’s clothes were restyled but her face remained more or less the same, as if they wanted to differentiate her in some ways without deviating too far in others.

So does this mean that the dea of Peach and Rosalina being sisters have any basis in the games? 

No, not technically, aside from the fact that they look like they should be related. But the games don’t comment on this or hint that there’s a reason Peach and Rosalina physically resemble each other. This is very weird, I must say. In most fictional continuities, if a new character showed up looking strikingly like an existing character, you’d expect that to be explained in some way — a long-lost child, a secret sibling or an evil clone, for example — but the Super Mario video games have just declined to address this matter. 

Before you do what I did and default to blaming Shigeru Miyamoto for this, I feel like I should point out that this particular subject tends to make fans bring up his alleged hatred of story elements in the Super Mario series. This rep might be unfair, however. For one thing, there’s a 2023 IGN interview in which Miyamoto clarifies that he just thinks other elements should be given equal or greater consideration in the creation of video games. For another, the perception that he’s anti-story has colored a misconception regarding Super Mario Galaxy specifically. In the game, we get a hint at where Rosalina came from via her storybook time with the Luma, which is such an emotional touchstone of this character and this series that it’s literally how The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opens.

As the story is often told, this element had to be inserted into the original game covertly so Miyamoto didn’t remove it. Looking at the accounts of how it came to be, however, this seems inaccurate. In a 2007 interview for Wired, Chris Kohler does in fact lead with a quote from Yoshiaki Koizumi, the director of the Super Mario Galaxy video game, that basically calls Miyamoto anti-story.

“I would sort of try to find sneaky ways to get [story elements] in without them noticing too much,” Koizumi said of his early work. “These are aspects of the games that Miyamoto wasn’t nearly as fond of, and occasionally didn’t like.”

Importantly, however, this quote has Koizumi referring to his early work at Nintendo. When it comes to how Rosalina’s storybook vignettes made it into Super Mario Galaxy, he mentions no interference from Miyamoto.

For a long time, it really felt like telling a story in a Mario game was something that wasn’t allowed. But I felt in this case that the Lumas and Rosalina really needed a story to explain what they were doing out there and to give the players a deeper understanding of their presence. So telling her story as a fairytale by reading the book to all the Lumas as if they were young children at storytime just seemed like the mood-appropriate way to accomplish this.

Dropping it into the game in the middle of the hub right there as something you could choose if you wanted to, I felt worked very well. If the book was standing all alone on its own, or if the game story was standing on its own, neither of them work very well as separate elements. But together, they reinforce each other quite nicely. And people have the option of hearing that story if they want to, or never going into that room if they don't want to hear it. Even so, just making the children's book was quite a feat. It was a bit of a struggle for us to get it done. And a couple things that we cut from the book ended up going into the main story as well. So it was a pretty good process.

We get even more insight as to the process in the February 2008 issue of Nintendo Power.

I have a lot of responsibilities as a director, but writing scenarios is special to me because it’s what I used to focus on exclusively.

The story of how I created Rosalina’s tale is actually kind of interesting because I had to keep it a secret from Mr. Miyamoto, who didn’t know that I was doing it. When I presented it to him, Mr. Miyamoto said, “Are you telling me that you worked on this late at night when no one was around so that they wouldn't find out about it?” And I said, “Yes, it was very important to me.”

It's often thought that Mario games don't need stories; for Galaxy, all most people really need to know is why Mario is in space and why the player must collect stars. But for those that would like a deeper narrative experience, I wanted to create a backdrop of Rosalina and the Lumas; what their relationship is to each other, how they came to the point they are at when you meet them, and how Mario had connected with a much larger story.

Miyamoto’s role is stated in an elliptical manner here, but if you just read what Koizumi is presenting, it’s pretty clear that he wrote the Rosalina’s storybook sections on his own because it carried emotional weight for him, not because he was necessarily hiding it from Miyamoto. And however negotiations between him and Miyamoto went, the segments made it into the game, so ultimately Miyamoto approved them.

I suppose it’s possible that Miyamoto may have also considered and then rejected any kind of in-game confirmation that Rosalina was Peach’s long-lost sister, cousin, mother, or daughter from the future, Sailor Moon-style. But without asking them both, we don’t know who made that call. For all we know it was Koizumi, as the story ultimately leaves this vague.

This is a long-winded way of saying that nothing concrete made it into the game. Regarding the notion of Peach and Rosalina being sisters, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is not drawing on the games per se but rather something that predates Super Mario Galaxy — something ultra obscure, behind the scenes and on the drawing boards only, to the point that it’s not actually canon. It’s actually something the canon rejected.

So does the movie mean that Rosalina will become Peach’s sister in the games?

Obviously, I don’t work at Nintendo, but I’d imagine not. There’s nothing in Miyamoto’s quote to Forbes that makes me think the games will adapt the movie’s canon in the future. I should point out that the versions of characters we see in the movie are often distinct from their video game counterparts. The movie version of Peach is a little colder than the game version, and the movie version of Rosalina is a little warmer than the stoic star mother we get in the games, to the point that I feel like Ana Taylor-Joy and Brie Larson would have been better off swapping roles, but whatever. The movie also makes the point of calling Rosalina a princess, even though she’s never been called that in the games, despite the fact that she looks like she belongs in that club just based on the dress, the brooch and the crown. In fact, both the games and the movie use the term in a way that makes me wonder what exactly it means in either universe.

I mean, it’s not as if the first movie reintroducing Foreman Spike resulted in that character having anything to do in the subsequent games, official name change notwithstanding.

If you want more of my thoughts on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, I was a guest in last week’s episode of Nintendo Cartridge Society. I also recorded an episode just this morning with Retronauts, so look forward to that one as well.

Miscellaneous Notes

My primary reaction to the movie making Peach and Rosalina sisters is that I worried it would make people think that Nintendo was trying to play off the success of Frozen. Rosalina debuted in the Super Mario games years before Frozen opened in theaters, but Frozen proved to be such a pop culture juggernaut that I can imagine some people might see Rosalina as Disney’s answer to Elsa. They’re both emotionally restrained, full of mystical powers and fond of a certain shade of blue. Rosalina has even been associated with ice even though there’s nothing about her Super Mario Galaxy appearances that connects her with that. What’s worse, her being surprise sisters with Peach just makes Peach seem like Anna. Oh well!

If anyone in the Super Mario games seemed like she should be Peach’s sister, it really seems like Daisy makes more sense. Daisy is often the Luigi to Peach’s Mario, after all, but I suppose Rosalina makes a more compelling character, especially if you’re setting the story primarily in outer space. I can’t imagine how they’d fit Daisy into things in a subsequent movie, especially because she theoretically has less “stuff” than Rosalina, since Rosalina is the one with magic powers. Daisy is just pep and sports gear.