Shigeru Miyamoto is personally overseeing the creation of a series of cartoons based on the characters of the Pikmin series. According to Polygon, the series is scheduled to be released sometime before the release of Pikmin 3. If they series turns out to be popular, it’s something Nintendo could consider selling, according to Miyamoto.
The first video shown off was created by Miyamoto with the help of an external animation studio. Miyamoto said he used the 3DS’ Flipnote Studio to create mock-up examples of what he’d like to see and then discussed the project with the animation director from the studio in order to complete the video.
“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, but instead decided to do the 3D glasses video.”
These shorts were then shown in Japanese cinemas in order to gauge the reaction from people. The videos are certainly a pet project of Miyamoto’s, as he stated he began creating them as a way to bring more life to the Pikmin characters.
“I didn’t want to license our characters out to someone else to create films. 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. We didn’t have a good opportunity to announce that we were doing this, so while we were working on the movies we also created the Pikmin video that opened our E3 presentation last year.”
Currently the shorts aren’t available for public watching yet, but you can watch last year’s E3 presentation above. If the same technology that created that intro to the E3 presentation is used to make these shorts, then it’s likely that a Pikmin cartoon could be a great hit. Of course, Miyamoto has stressed that working on these cartoons hasn’t affected his game design duties and it’s mostly just a pet project that will likely help promote Pikmin 3 before its released.
What do you think of the news? Would you like to see a full animated series based on Pikmin? If the series was released on the eShop, would you buy them?Let us know in the comments below.
[via Polygon]
