Nintendo used a Saturday livestream to declare November 1 “Pikmin Day” and announce a new short movie series called Hello! Pikmin. The first episode aired during the stream itself, and a second one has already gone out.
The schedule after that is monthly. One more episode arrives later this month, then a new short every month starting in December. Pikmin has an advantage here that most game mascots do not: the cast needs no dialogue to work, so a sixty-second short can be a complete joke. Short-form anime has become a real category in Japan, with TV Tokyo and Plott launching a vertical-shorts series this month.
The game announcements attached to it
The shorts were not the only thing in the stream. Nintendo showed off Dandori Academy, a new mode coming to the Nintendo Switch 2 edition of Pikmin 4, with a demo video. Both the Switch 2 version and the mode launch on November 12, and a free demo is on the way.
Pikmin Bloom, the mobile game made with Niantic, is also getting a new feature called Secret Caves this winter. Bloom has been running since October 2021 and has quietly become the most consistently updated Pikmin product of the last five years, which is not where most people expected the franchise to end up.
A series that took its time
Pikmin is 25 years old now. The first game arrived on the GameCube in 2001, built around the idea of commanding a swarm of small plant creatures to haul objects back to a spaceship before nightfall. It was strange, and it sold modestly.
What followed was a slow, uneven run. Pikmin 3 came to the Wii U in 2013. The side-scrolling Hey! Pikmin shipped for the 3DS in July 2017, a game that most of the fanbase has agreed to forget. Pikmin 3 Deluxe landed on the Switch in 2020, Pikmin Bloom in October 2021, and Pikmin 4 in July 2023.
That is four main entries across two and a half decades, and Nintendo treats Pikmin the way it treats a pet project rather than a franchise. The result is a series with a small, stubborn audience, very few entries, and one that everybody has quietly agreed not to bring up.
Why an animated short is the right format
Full Pikmin anime would be an odd fit. The games have no spoken dialogue, the protagonist is silent, and the emotional register runs on tiny creatures getting eaten. A short series can keep all of that and skip the part where somebody has to write a plot.
The monthly cadence is the interesting decision. Weekly would burn through material; yearly would let the property go cold again. One short a month is roughly how often the internet needs to be reminded that Pikmin exists, and it lines up with the Switch 2 push for Pikmin 4 without demanding a new game.
Nintendo has never had much of an animation strategy, and this is the lowest-risk version of one: short, cheap to produce, easy to stop if nobody watches, and tied to a release the company was promoting anyway.
Where to watch
The shorts are titled Hello! Pikmin, and that is most of what has been confirmed about distribution. Nintendo has not said whether they will sit on YouTube, inside the Switch’s own channels, or somewhere else entirely, and no streaming partner has been named.
The Switch 2 edition of Pikmin 4 and the Dandori Academy mode arrive November 12. Secret Caves comes to Pikmin Bloom this winter. The next Hello! Pikmin short lands later this month, with monthly instalments from December.
Sources
Anime News Network — Pikmin Game Gets Short Film Series
Featured image: Still from the Hello! Pikmin short film series, via Anime News Network.
