The year was 2014 and Nintendo was in one of the worst financial pickles that the company had ever seen thanks to the poor sales of the Wii U. You might think that this was no time for joviality, but this is Nintendo that we are talking about, and Miyamoto had other ideas.
Taking his favourite child, Pikmin, the legendary game designer announced that he was working on a series of short films that would help to promote the series' third entry, Pikmin 3, which had released the year prior. It was a move that wouldn't have made it onto many-a Nintendo fan's bingo card, but the results were, to put it simply, wonderful.
The three short movies premiered at the 2014 Tokyo International Film Festival, before becoming available to download on the Wii U and 3DS eShops for $4.99/£4.49/€4.99. Before the service had a chance to close down, the shorts were moved onto the official Nintendo of America YouTube channel in 2020 where they have remained available to watch, for free, ever since.
'The Night Juicer', the first and shortest of the trio, shows a group of Pikmin's confusion over Olimar's nighttime juicing habits; 'Treasure in a Bottle' sees one red Pikmin doing everything he can to get his hands on a shiny marble, while 'Occupational Hazards' is all about Olimar's attempt to clear a building site. Each takes place with no dialogue and is packed full of enough slapstick comedy to keep an audience of any age entertained.
With the release of Pikmin 4 coming our way next week, we thought this would be the perfect time to revisit the shorts for a final burst of Pikmin preparation and we have attached each of them below for your viewing pleasure.
Popcorn at the ready? Let's dive in...
The Night Juicer
Treasure in a Bottle
Occupational Hazards
In July of last year, Nintendo acquired the production company behind each of the above shorts, Dynamo Pictures, rebranding it under the name 'Nintendo Pictures'. We can only hope that this means that more Pikmin shorts will be coming our way in the future — the release of Pikmin 4 sure would be a good time to get the movie ball rolling again, we'd say...
Are you still charmed by the Pikmin shorts? Let us know in the comments.
Comments 12
Had these on the Wii U, would be nice if these were on the Pikmin 1+2 cart as a little bonus.
Occupational Hazards has +150M views across all of Nintendo's Youtube channels!
One might say that they are…Pikmin Blooming marvelous…
These are probably the closest we’ll ever get to a Pikmin movie, and I will gladly take them. They are gorgeous little gems.
I love that these shorts were viewable on the 3DS and on the Wii U, so you had the option between watching them in 3D and watching them in HD...
Poochie and Yoshi's Woolly World on the 3DS is the only way to watch the adorable shorts with Yarn Yoshi and Poochie, aside from blurry 2D footage captured from the 3DS on YouTube. It's one of the biggest reasons why I hope they port Yoshi's Woolly World to Switch, if only so they have an excuse to add HD versions of those videos. PLEASE, NINTENDO!
These shorts are great. I bought them for wiiu and enjoyed all of them. It would be fun if they created new shorts after the release of Pikmin 4.
I still feel a little miffed about the fact that I purchased these shorts on Wii U, only for them to be uploaded to YouTube six years later where they can be watched for free. Oh well, I'm not too bothered about it, since I'll jump at any opportunity to support the Pikmin series!
Oh yeah, and I loved watching these shorts back in the day. It was nice seeing Olimar and the Pikmin in action and the kind of situations they got themselves into. I especially liked the personalites of the White and Purple Pikmin, my two favourite Pikmin types. The shorts also have a surprisingly dark sense of humour too, which is almost a little off-putting at times.
On another note, look at the number of views they have! And the Japanese uploads have even more views! If only those view counts translated into sales figures for the actual games themselves...
Still have them on the Wii u. My Wii u is a great Pikmin machine.
It always cracked me up when they pixelate the corpse of that Bulborb before the scoop falls on it. xD
Now that Nintendo is into movies, maybe we can have a follow-up, More Pikmin Short Movies (yes, I'm serious about that title) or make them sort of like the Simpsons episode "22 Shorts Movies about Springfield".
Yeah, they are brilliant, I really enjoyed them.
I love them so much. I ignored the Pikmin series for all 3 games because I don't like RTS. But then 2 things happened:
1)The Wii U demo came out for Pikmin 3.
2) These shorts were released.
Now it's my favorite Nintendo series, and these shorts played a significant role in getting me interested.
@HammerGalladeBro Something, something, Steamed Hams.
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