Nintendo To Make ‘Pikmin’ Cartoon Shorts

Nintendo is working on a series of cartoon shorts based on Pikmin.

Pikmin is a Nintendo videogame based on small creatures that are half-plant, half-animal. A small alien (Captain Olimar) crash-lands on Earth and finds what appears to be an onion, and when the onion sprouts long legs drops a seed, it sprouts into a Pikmin. You find flowers and such, throw the Pikmin at them, and the little creatures carry them to the onion spaceship. The ship transforms the plants into more Pikmin. Different kinds of Pikmin have different properties, such as being immune to fire.

Aside from cameos and appearances in such games as Smash Bros, we haven’t seen much of the little plant-things since Pikmin 2 in 2004. Lately, the news tells us that thanks to Nintendo Land and Pikmin 3 announcements, things are really looking up for everyone’s favorite adorable plant-like creatures.

Shigeru Miyamoto is overseeing Nintendo’s production of the Pikmin cartoon shorts. He says:

“We were working on several Pikmin CG animated videos and wanted more people to be able to see them. I had gone to a movie theater and saw the videos telling people to turn off their cell phones and thought we could create a Pikmin version of that… 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 [like Ang Lee’s Hulk], so we started work on these Pikmin videos…. We really just want to take advantage of the Pikmin characters…. Nintendo 3DS is great for viewing 3D video content so we wanted to look at ways to expand that offering. [The Pikmin cartoon shorts will] be released sometime before the release of Pikmin 3.”

In the first short, Captain Olimar is slicing up and drinking what appears to be a red pikmin. Then the camera zooms out and we see he’s just pureeing carrots. Shigeru Miyamoto comments, “So it’s kind of dark, but he doesn’t eat them.”

What do you think of Nintendo’s idea of Pikmin cartoon shorts?

Nintendo producing Pikmin cartoon shorts goo.gl/6NZ1M

— Shacknews (@shacknews) March 11, 2013