Nintendo has started creating animated shorts for the 3DS based around Pikmin, led by Shigeru Miyamoto. While Nintendo has licensed out franchises like F-Zero and Kirby in the past for full fledged anime TV series, this is more of a side-project for Miyamoto for the moment.
“They’ll be released sometime before the release of Pikmin 3, possibly as a Nintendo video. If they’re popular we could consider selling them,” said Miyamoto, who worked with an outside animation studio to refine the first short. “I didn’t want to license our characters out to someone else to create films,” he said. “Instead, since I used to draw four-panel comics when I was younger, I thought it would be fun to bring a four-panel comic approach to creating video content, so we started work on these Pikmin videos.”
Miyamoto was quick to dismiss this as suggesting larger plans by Nintendo to push their franchises into multiple mediums and he denied that this means he’d switch away from making games. “We really just want to take advantage of the Pikmin characters,” he said. “We have started selling Shaun the Sheep videos, so we’re continuing to look at ways to expand the eShop offerings. Nintendo 3DS is great for viewing 3D video content so we wanted to look at ways to expand that offering.”
Source: Polygon.com
