Very curious how Mario Galaxy will handle Peach since so much of her characterization in the first movie was driven by necessity.
Functionally, Movie 1 Peach is first and foremost the cool mentor meant to set up Mario’s arc/journey. Mario and the audience need to understand that Bowser, despite being funny and kind of pathetic, is a genuine threat, so Peach needs to be dead serious about the mission. Mario’s arc is all about having the perseverance to become a true hero, so he needs someone to measure his progress against. There’s not a pre-existing character that fits that role, so making Peach hyper-competent is the next best option. Mario’s arc is also about overcoming others’ doubts and a lot of the movie’s humor plays off his overconfidence, so Peach’s humor has to take him down a peg (calling him short, “he’s not important!”, etc). Since this movie is about Mario’s arc first and foremost, Peach still can’t solve their problems - most notably she kinda just gives up when Cranky Kong says no, since this needs to be a problem Mario solved by stubbornly fighting and beating DK. That’s not to say she doesn’t get her moments to shine (she does a lot of cool stuff around the wedding), but more often than not her mechanical purpose is to aid Mario’s arc, as any mentor would.
Not everything Peach does is driven by being the mentor, but a lot of the exceptions are instead devoted to setup. She has her adorable “you’re a human??” moment, her backstory, and the “a lot of galaxies” moment. These are good bits of characterization on their own (Peach’s loneliness as the former only one of her kind is such an interesting angle that the games have never explored), but it’s definitely more setup that characterization.
All of that is to say that what they could do with Peach in Movie 1 was incredibly constrained by the needs of a very fast-paced movie. But Galaxy is interesting because all of those needs have already been fulfilled.
Mario’s character arc from Movie 1 is seemingly complete, so Peach doesn’t need to cater to that. Mario and Luigi already have a history/beef with Bowser, so Peach doesn’t need to hype him up. The setting is just as unfamiliar to Peach as it is to Mario, so she gets to partake in the wonder instead of being a guide. Heck, the fact that she’s seemingly separated from Mario for part of the movie means she gets more opportunities to solve problems on her own (looking at you, Wart). And on top of that, all the setup with her backstory seems like it will pay off in this movie, so we’ll get a deeper exploration of her character.
I’m not expecting anything crazy deep. It’s a 90 minute popcorn flick crammed full of a bunch of characters and zany setpieces. But still, I’m very excited to see where they take Peach now that she’s not forced to carry a ton of the story’s structure on her shoulders!
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