Shigeru Miyamoto is working on translating the Pikmin series into animated shorts. The Nintendo executive showed one episode of his new project to Polygon last week. Olimar appears to be blending Pikmin into a delicious smoothie during the episode, but is actually blending up non-sentient carrots.
“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.”
The project comes from Miyamoto’s desire to “give more life to the Pikmin characters,” and is structured like brief 4-panel comics. The original episode and the Pikmin-themed logo animation recently shown in Japan’s Toho theaters were made by Nintendo with the help of an animation studio.
The Pikmin shorts will be released “sometime before the release of Pikmin 3,” Miyamoto said, putting it somewhere in the first half of 2013. According to him, they may appear on the 3DS video service, or Nintendo may sell the shorts on the eShop.
