Nintendo’s Short Films Feel Like They Could Be The Start Of Something Much Bigger

Fans spent a lot of time trying to decipher possible clues hiding in a recent Pixar-like Nintendo short film featuring a baby and, as it turned out later on, Pikmin. Were they a tease for a new Pikmin game? Rosalina’s origin story in the Mario Galaxy movie? Apparently not. Nintendo now claims this short film experiment was all just for fun. It’s easy to see where it could go in the future, though. Are these the first building blocks of Nintendo’s version of a Disney-style streaming library? “These are the first short films created by Nintendo Pictures Co., Ltd.,” the company posted online this morning. “Nintendo Pictures will continue to explore new creative possibilities through video content.” The Pikmin shorts come just a couple months after a series of claymation Mario videos that felt like something out of Sesame Street. While they turned out to be hocking new merchandise for the Super Mario Bros. 40th anniversary, it was easy to imagine a whole streaming series based around a similar aesthetic and visual gags. This isn’t even the first time Nintendo has experimented with short movies and made Pikmin the stars. We hope you enjoyed the two “Close to You” videos released on October 7 and 8.The second video is available on Nintendo Today!, a free app available on your smart device.These are the first short films created by Nintendo Pictures Co., Ltd.Nintendo Pictures will continue to… pic.twitter.com/GKizLT0Ckv — 任天堂株式会社 (@Nintendo) October 9, 2025 It’s notable that the second of the two Pikmin short films is only viewable inside the Nintendo Today! app, a strange Switch 2-era digital curio that Nintendo still seems to be figuring out. It’s part of a growing and weirdly aligned set of entertainment touchpoints for the brand. There’s the music app with soundtracks dating back to the NES days, Switch Online’s library of classic games, new theme parks, and box office blockbusters like the upcoming Mario Galaxy and Zelda movies. Also alarm clocks, amiibo, Lego, and a whole adjacent universe of Pokémon, whose streaming app inside Switch was killed off a year ago. I would never expect Nintendo to do something so sane, rational, and predictable as trying to wrap all of this stuff into one coherent super-app, but it is easy to see an opening for more Nintendo content on streaming. The company doesn’t need an entire platform of content to win people over with a few hits. Millions of households sign up for Disney+ just for Bluey. Where is Nintendo’s Bluey? I say that not as some writer cosplaying as an industry analyst, but as a parent with three children who love Mario and have run out of Bluey to watch. They still occasionally watch the old Mario cartoons from the ’90s that I grew up with. What else are they going to do when they finish Super Mario Bros. Wonder and get tired of streaming The Super Mario Bros. Movie for the 50th time? If your answer is “Go back and play Super Mario Bros 3,“ than you’ve never watched young kids who weren’t raised on 8-bit graphics try to grapple with the low-stimulation limitations of unforgiving 2D platforming. Nintendo execs have spoken in the past about how the company’s biggest competitors aren’t PlayStation or Xbox but Netflix and the smartphone. It gave up trying to put games on mobile marketplaces dominated by free-to-play casinos, but it’s finally seeing if there’s a place in the ever-expanding universe of short-form video for a Mario-sized respite from all the algorithmic junk. That would be nice! I would take that over an Alarmo 2.