Pikmin animated shorts on the way, directed by Shigeru Miyamoto

Nintendo’s getting back into cartoons, well sort of. Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed in a new interview that there are some Pikmin animated shorts on the way. He’s even directed them himself.

The shorts are set to be released before the release of Pikmin 3 on the Wii U, but they will be likely distributed via Nintendo Video on the Nintendo 3DS, hopefully they’ll be coming to the Wii U too.

Miyamoto has been toying with the idea of animated Pikmin shorts for some time, the test bed for these shorts was a simple ‘turn off your phone’ message before movies screening in Japan.

“I didn’t want to license our characters out to someone else to create films,”Miyamoto has told Polygon. “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.”

The shorts’ story has been revealed and will see Captain Olimar blending a red Pikmin into juice and taking a swig, don’t worry it’s just a carrot. These small stories are meant to be like the four panel comics Miyamoto used to draw.

Miyamoto is only doing this as a side project and isn’t spending too much time on them, don’t worry he’s still working on plenty of games.

Anyone for a Pikmin cartoon then?