Nintendo’s senior managing director and legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that he is helping spearhead a cartoon series built upon the loveable Pikmin series. Miyamoto says that the Pikmin based cartoons will be launched before Pikmin 3‘s release this Spring/Summer, and will possibly appear on Nintendo Video. If the cartoons prove to be popular then Miyamoto has suggested that they may begin selling them. The video that was showcased was created by Miyamoto with the help of an external animation studio. Here’s some details.
“We were working on several Pikmin CG animated videos and wanted more people to be able to see them,” he said. “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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When Olimar first discovered the Pikmin he named them based on the PikPik brand carrots in his home world, so he clearly loves carrots,” Miyamoto said. “I thought it would be fun to have a scenario where it seems like he is going to eat the Pikmin. So it’s kind of dark, but he doesn’t eat them.”
“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.”