Miyamoto Working on Pikmin Cartoon Series

Nintendo might be leaping into the cartoon business with a Pikmin animated series planned.

There have been animated shorts in the past based on Nintendo properties, like Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda and of course the ever-popular Pokémon animé series, and designer Shigeru Miyamoto wants to try a series based on Pikmin.

To celebrate the release of Pikmin 3 this year, Miyamoto confirmed that he's in the middle of directing the cartoons in conjunction with an external animation studio. These may released on Nintendo Video, possibly sold, prior to the release of the eagarly anticipated Pikmin 3 later this year.

In order to pitch his ideas to the studio he used Flipnote Studio on the 3DS to create a rough mock-up idea and then passed onto the animation studio to work on the sequences.

The first of the planned shorts, shown to Polygon this week, depicts protagonist Captain Olimar appear to attempt to slice and dice Pikmin with a knife because they appear like carrots. "So it's kind of dark, but he doesn't eat them."

We really just want to take advantage of the Pikmin characters. We have started selling Shaun the Sheep videos, so we're continuing to look at ways to expand the eShop offerings. Nintendo 3DS is great for viewing 3D video content so we wanted to look at ways to expand that offering.

What do you think of possibilities for the upcoming Pikmin cartoon series? What other Nintendo franchises would you want in cartoon form?