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Super Mario Bros. Wonder uses 2D animation techniques with 3D models by manually deforming each limb on every frame of an animation. Above are three successive frames of Mario's "pipe exit" animation; note the lengths of each of his legs.

Most previous Mario games have worked with regular 3D animation techniques where Mario's limbs were always a constant length and bending deformed them in a predictable way without stretching them. More recent entries in the series, like Super Mario Odyssey, experimented with squashing and stretching, but not on a frame-by-frame basis like Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

Illustration of Mario dancing, from a 1986 issue of the Japanese Family Computer Magazine.

The Art of Super Mario Odyssey book reveals that the Maw-Ray eel enemies from the game (bottom left) were envisioned to be the same as the Unagi eel enemies from Super Mario 64 (top left), but “real”, likely suggesting that it is merely a more realistic design of the same enemy.