Donkey Kong's Redesign is Pretty Great, Actually

Art is always subjective, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, humans are resistant to change, etc. But gall dang, reading comments on the internet, you’d think the new Donkey Kong design poisoned your cat and pushed your grandmother down a flight of stairs. The nature of the internet makes it hard to get a solid read on the general consensus, since the angriest voices are usually the loudest, but I feel like I might be in the minority in regards to DK’s new look. I think it’s a fantastic design that incorporates all of the best aspects of each era of his existence. To me, it’s nothing but a straight upgrade. There isn’t anything about the Rare design (I know they were called Rareware at the time, but I’m going to be referring to them by their current name for the duration of this article) that I could point to as looking outright better or more appealing. As with any type of aesthetic appeal, it ultimately comes down to matters of taste, which can vary drastically from person to person and change over time. But I think time will be kind to this redesign and eventually be widely seen as a positive and necessary change.

I’ve struggled to understand the backlash against Donkey Kong’s modern redesign, because to me it feels like nothing but a clear improvement. It keeps the elements that made the Rare design recognizable while subtly reintroducing some of the warmth and expressiveness of his earlier incarnations. The biggest upgrade, in my view, is in his facial features—especially his eyes and browline. The new design is simply more alive, with the capacity to cleanly display a huge range of emotions and facial expressions. Rare’s DK, while iconic, always felt a little stiff and emotionally flat to me. There was something strangely vacant in his eyes, a lifeless quality that made him feel more like a digitized puppet than a lively character of his own. He leaned just a bit too far into the “vaguely realistic gorilla” territory without fully embracing the cartoon energy that has consistently defined most of the Mario cast. Attempts to animate him in exaggerated ways would tend to fall flat for me because of the limitations of the model.

That’s understandable, to a point. Rare’s Donkey Kong was made for Donkey Kong Country, a series of games with their own distinct tone and visual identity—slightly grungier, moodier, and more grounded than the colorful cartoon chaos of the mainline Mario series. The character was redesigned to match that vibe, and it worked really well in context. But that same design became the default DK for everything afterward, whether it fit the tone or not. In game, he fit in just fine in early 3D games featuring the larger Mario cast, such as the N64's Mario Tennis, but this mostly came down to the fact that everyone was made of jagged polygons that barely resembled their promotional art. As Nintendo's graphics improved, the contrast between DK and the rest of the Mario cast became more jarring. He could sometimes look out of place—like a guest from another cartoon universe that never fully adopted the exaggerated, expressive style shared by the rest of the cast. The modern design resolves that tension. It reintroduces the “squishiness”—the visual elasticity and emotional clarity—I expect from a character in this world. He finally feels like a proper character. Where there was once nothing but emptiness, I can now easily intuit intent and personality from the new version. Plus, his formerly weird, retractable teeth are now consistently present in his mouth.

Why the Backlash?

Change is always going to ruffle someone's feathers, especially when it comes to iconic characters. But I think the backlash to Donkey Kong’s redesign isn’t just about nostalgia—I posit that it is also tied to decades of inconsistency around who Donkey Kong actually is. His characterization has been all over the map. Depending on the game, he’s been portrayed as an animalistic beast, a heroic figure, a comic sidekick, or an antagonistic presence. While the Mario cast is generally flexible enough to adapt to different tones and genres, Donkey Kong often ended up on the wrong side of that flexibility. Instead of being versatile, his identity just felt muddled.

I would argue that it wasn’t really until Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat that it all solidified into a more cohesive take on the character—a confident, athletic, slightly goofy DK with a clearer, more defined personality. This may have been the first major appearance of “modern” DK. But by then, his design had already been locked into something created for a very different tone. The Rare-era DK was built for a platformer with a very specific vibe, and while that worked in its original context, it became a poor fit as his role shifted. His modern persona was essentially Frankensteined together—an expressive, cartoonish personality trapped inside an aging design that wasn’t built to support it.

Even in crossover titles like Super Smash Bros., DK often felt like a placeholder character. His moveset throughout the series has leaned heavily towards “generic brute”—powerful slaps, punches, and headbutts that could easily belong to any big ape, without much that felt uniquely Donkey Kong. He didn’t even have his iconic Roll Attack until Smash 4. Later games—particularly from Brawl onward—drew a bit more from his history for Final Smashes and taunts and whatnot, but the base moveset has seen very little change. And then there’s his voice in Mario Kart 64, which was so aggressively animalistic it felt like it belonged to an entirely different take on the character. The Switch 2-era redesign feels like the culmination of many small steps toward solidifying a definitive Donkey Kong—one who actually fits within the Mario universe both visually and tonally while keeping everything that makes him unique and appealing.

One of the best things about the new design—as I touched on before—is how much more expressive it makes Donkey Kong. The Rare design—with its rigid brow ridge, limited eye movement, and stiff lips—severely constrained his emotional range. He could look angry pretty well, but everything else landed somewhere in the vague zone of “kinda happy” or “slightly sad”, with very little perceptible nuance. In the right animator’s hands, he was definitely more expressive, particularly in games like Mario Strikers: Battle League and the Switch remake of Mario vs. Donkey Kong. But these outliers felt like they were pushing the limits of the model, and even at his most exaggerated, his face always seemed stuck in this emotional gray area—never fully committing to a clear mood. The updated design blows that wide open. Thanks to more flexible, exaggerated facial features, DK can now display emotions that are unmistakably clear and deeply readable. Just look at the box art for Donkey Kong Bananza—he looks absolutely, furiously determined. And when he smiles? It’s a big, dopey grin that radiates personality. His whole face is now an expressive playground, capable of delivering drastically different emotions at full volume. The cast of Super Mario Bros. Wonder got a similarly expressive glow-up that is carried over into Mario Kart World, and I see DK’s treatment as a natural extension of that design philosophy. Granted, Mario and co. received much more subtle tweaks when compared with Donkey Kong, but I would argue that they did not need anything as drastic as DK did anyway. With this more cohesive design philosophy, the cast of Mario Kart World looks great sharing a screen together. This is a thankfully far cry from DK’s absolutely awful, dead-eyed, slack-jawed character model in Mario Kart 8.

I would speculate that a big part of the backlash might come down to the fact that we’re just not used to seeing this level of energy and exaggeration from Donkey Kong. It’s like suddenly realizing your quiet, reserved friend is actually a high-energy goofball when they’re in the right setting with a few drinks in them. Sure, subtlety has its place—but this is Donkey Kong. He’s a cartoon gorilla who once punched the moon out of its orbit; he’s not some brooding antihero. He's not some tragic, godlike figure like King Kong; he's a silly ape whose name was chosen because "Donkey" embodied the dumb, stubborn, humorous characteristics they were trying to capture. Exaggeration and visual punch are the lifeblood of animation, and the new design finally lets DK embrace that energy to its fullest. I liked it from the moment I first glimpsed it in the Switch 2 teaser with the first Mario Kart World footage, and it’s only grown on me the more I’ve seen of it. To drive this point home, let’s look at some comparisons.

Ultimately, it all comes down to matters of taste. As such, I accept that in your mind, I could be completely off the mark here. But this is just how I made sense of all the discourse in my own head. To sum it up: I think the redesign is great—a straight upgrade with no real downsides—and the majority of the critics just need more time and exposure to its expressiveness to get used to it. I feel like I always wanted to love DK himself—since I loved the games he starred in—but I consistently felt turned off by his character design not embodying the warm feelings of his games. With this new version, it feels like the character has been liberated and can finally be fully appreciated for his loveable, authentic self. He's still recognizably himself, he just feels like more of himself to me now.

Update - 5/21/2025
Speak of the DK, and he shall appear. A day after posting this article, IGN released this interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that sheds a bit more light on the reasoning behind the resdesign. I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a bit validated by the fact that he specifically brought up Jungle Beat as a turning point for the character's expressiveness. One of the relevant quotes is as follows:

"So when it comes to character creation and working with characters, I still take an active role in that. And looking back to the first generation Donkey Kong Country, we worked with Rare to create Donkey Kong Country.

When we were talking about trying to create new versions, evolving Donkey Kong, we created the game called Jungle Beat. We worked together with the team that made 3D Mario. With the technology that was available at the time, we were able to make Donkey Kong more expressive. And going back to the design that Rare came up with, we reevaluated; what can we do with the design to make it more expressive? And then when it comes to the movie, we decided to move forward with this new generation Donkey Kong design."