Now that's what I call education!
This was an excellent piece of work, truly deserving of the 100% you received from your teacher. Graphics were awesome. I watched this through several times, and couldn't find anything wrong with the spritework. The placement of characters and objects was basically perfect, and the frame rate made it look like the motion shots were taken straight from the game. Nice job recreating the slow falling motion of the cape feather ;) All the little details in this, like the "Z"s when Mario fell asleep during Lakitu's lecture (probably taken from the sleeping fish in the water levels) were something I could really appreciate as a Mario fan. Was that ice pack in the game at any point? I don't remember seeing it, but it's been a long time since I've played, and it looked so perfect in the Mario environment that I may well be mistaken. Due to your masterful use of the sprites, I also gave you a high score in style, because it really made the movie feel just like the game (which I'm sure you intended to do). Something else you did that brought back fond memories of my days playing Super Mario World was your use of two locations that were very familiar to me (I believe the wave part was set in Yoshi's Island 2, and the sound barrier part was from Donut Plains 1). The use of these locations to demonstrate those particular parts of physics was both creative and brilliant, especially the Koopa wave at the beginning (I never would have thought to look at that as a wave). The part at the end where Mario broke the sound barrier was also very well done, I liked how he gradually got faster, finally grabbing the Starman and causing a sonic boom. The sound, like everything else, was wonderful, you made great use of sound effects from the game. I loved your choice of the voice effects for Mario and Yoshi, it really helped to contribute to the humor in this (I thought it was hilarious when Yoshi did his classic scream as Mario began to move his tongue faster). The voice acting for Lakitu was pretty good. Not perfect, but far better than the voice acting I see in most submissions. The low level of violence is forgiveable, I understand that this wasn't meant to be an extremely violent flash, and I'm glad you didn't overdo it. The few violent moments were all very funny, especially when Lakitu hit Mario, who in turn let go of Yoshi's tongue and sent his poor green friend flying off the screen. I also liked at the end, when Mario's flight power ran out, and you could see him crashing into the mountain in the background. Interactivity was minimal, but, like violence, not really intended, or very necessary, so I won't hold it against you. The humor in this was ever present, and this, more than anything else, made the flash enjoyable, making sure that there was never a dull moment. Some other funny things I liked were Mario's apparent boredom with the lesson, and the way he pretended to understand the things Lakitu was talking about, even though he was obviously clueless. Some of Lakitu's lines were also pretty humorous, like "That's really weird, but I guess it'll work," but the best was "Hey Mario, I bet you can't break the sound barrier," it gave me a really strong feeling that he knew exactly what Mario would attempt if he said that, even though it was not exactly a wise feat to attempt. To the best of my knowledge, this is all educationally accurate. I haven't taken physics yet (that's next year), but I've taken trigonometry already, and all the stuff you said about the properties of the wave (like amplitude, frequency, crest, and trough) were correct, so I'm guessing the rest of the information in this was also pretty accurate. One last minor detail I liked was the apple that fell on Mario's head once the movie finished loading, the relevance to Sir Isaac Newton's contributions to physics was something else that struck me as simple brilliance. Great work, I'd like to see more educational flash like this from you in the future, perhaps something starring Luigi?