Everyone’s Convinced Nintendo’s Animated Short Is A Secret Pikmin Project

Nintendo dropped an animated short about a baby chasing its pacifier on Tuesday, with no further explanation as to what it means or what game or movie it might be for. The internet has spent the last 20 hours combing through the video frame by frame, and the consensus is that whatever the short is teasing, it has something to do with Pikmin.

Suspicions that Close to You might have something to do with Pikmin first arose when somebody spotted something scurrying under the bed behind the baby. It’s incredibly blurry, so it’s impossible to know for sure – it could just be another of the baby’s toys moving around – but I can’t deny it looks an awful lot like a red Pikmin.

This Is Definitely Something To Do With Pikmin, Right?

The closer people have looked, the more evidence they’ve found. The wand toy, that is visible in the opening shot of the short, that rolls towards the baby around 35 seconds in, looks a lot like the Pikmin motif. Pikmin fans are also convinced that some of the music we can hear during the short has been ripped straight from the Pikmin games. If you’re not convinced, listen for yourselves below. You soon will be.

There’s also Pikmin lore to consider, something you might not be entirely brushed up on (I know I wasn’t this time 24 hours ago). A screenshot from Pikmin Bloom, the Pokemon Go-like mobile game, notes that Pikmin are invisible to humans. While it’s just a fun way to explain why you can see them on your phone screen and not in the real world, in this instance, it would explain why the baby can only see their toys moving around and not the Pikmin themselves.

Pikmin creator Shigeru Miyamoto noted during an Ask The Developer series that his goal was for people who play the games to feel like Pikmin live here on Earth and are all around them all of the time. He also spoke about how fun it would be to make a Pikmin movie earlier this year and explained that, unlike other characters, there’s an unwritten rule at Nintendo that allows Pikmin to show up on other series’ worlds.

That final piece of evidence is why some people think this might not be as straightforward as Close to You being a teaser for a new Pikmin project. The first assumption was that the teaser has something to do with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Someone has even gone to the effort of comparing the baby’s hair with Rosalina’s, and it kind of lines up.

Perhaps this is all connected to the next Mario movie in some way, but I’m still leaning towards Pikmin. I don’t think it’s a full feature film or even a new game, but there have been high-quality Pikmin shorts before, and they were very popular, generating more than 200 million views between them. My guess is this is another series of shorts, and the next thing we’ll be shown is the same video, except we will be able to see the Pikmin.