Nintendo will debut a Pikmin short film at the Tokyo International Film Festival
A short-film anthology based on characters from Nintendo’s Pikmin series, appropriately titled Pikmin Short Movies, will debut at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival in October, according to an announcement on the festival’s official website. The project, which is computer animated and will be shown in 3D, is made up of three episodes, the titles and descriptions of which were shared on the film festival’s website:
“The Night Juicer,” in which Captain Olimar [the human-like astronaut who gets stranded on a planet full of helpful plant creatures known as Pikmin] makes his favorite juice; “Treasures In A Bottle,” in which Pikmin meet a strange treasure; “Occupational Hazards,” a big adventure at a construction site.”
Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Pikmin and all those other Nintendo games, produced the short film and will be giving a talk after the debut. Also present for this post-screening talk will be Nobuo Kawakami. He’s the head of a Japanese media company called Dwango, which runs Niconico—a sort of Japanese YouTube—and Nintendo bought a stake in it last year. But it’s not clear if the film, which the announcement described as the “achievement of a research project to give more life to the game characters of Pikmin,” was made at Nintendo or by an outside animation studio.