Four-minute video has no dialogue, but still contains audio clues as to what it might be.

Nintendo was a pioneer in creating a direct information pipeline to fans, and its Nintendo Direct long-form YouTube presentations are a strategy that several other entities in the game industry have since adopted. But while it’s sometimes willing to chat for hours on end about its upcoming projects, Nintendo now just dropped a lengthy, lavish CG animated video with absolutely no explanation at all and not a single word of spoken dialogue.

It’s titled Close to You, and that’s the only thing that Nintendo currently has to say about it. Despite the unceremonious way in which it was released via the company’s Japanese and U.S. YouTube channels, plus Nintendo’s official Twitter account, the animation is incredibly detailed and fluid, beyond what would make sense for a simple “Hey, we wanted to show off a fun little video some artists tossed together in their spare time” sort of thing.

The video starts off with a mother playing with her baby in the child’s nursery. A dog, presumably the family pet, starts barking, and Mom goes to check on it, consoling the fussy child with a pacifier before she walks out into the hall and shuts the door…and that’s when strange things start happening. A block falls, looking like maybe it was pushed over by a shift in the air current when Mom shut the door, but then an entire stack of blocks starts moving on its own. When the baby drops its pacifier, it seems to get picked up by some invisible creature trying to carry it off.

So what’s going on? My first guess was that it’s a preview for the upcoming Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. With the kid’s blond hair and sky-blue clothes, the color scheme is evocative of the Galaxy game’s Rosaline/Rosetta character, and the hyper-detailed textures on carpet and upholstery shown in the video seem like they’re trying to showcase theatrical-quality CG work. The designs of the baby and mom also have a bit of a “Hollywood CG animated movie” vibe to them, and don’t look like they’d be out of place in something produced by Illumination, Nintendo’s partner on the Super Mario movies.

However, while nobody says a word in the video, there are some audio clues as to what it might be foreshadowing. Several Twitter commenters have pointed out similarities between the video’s expressive piano soundtrack and pieces from the soundtrack of Nintendo’s Pikmin franchise. The series’ gameplay largely consists of guiding tiny aliens as they scavenge for necessary items, which bop around when being transported in a manner very similar to the blocks and pacifier in Close to You. And while we don’t actually see any of the primary-colored creatures actually carrying the items being moved about the baby’s room, in the shot below that red blur underneath the crib is clearly some sort of creature scuttling about.

Does this mean there’s a new Pikmin sequel on the way? The timing seems a little early for that. The most recent game in the series, Pikmin 4 came out in 2023, and Nintendo usually spaces out its mainline franchise installments quite a bit. Pikmin 3 was released in 2013, so a two-year turnaround for Pikmin 5 is unlikely.

But if Close to You is part of Pikmin, but not part of Pikmin 5, what is it? It could be part of a Pikmin 4 rerelease for the Switch 2, as Nintendo has been reheating a number of Switch hits for its new console, giving them graphical upgrades and, in some cases, additional gameplay content. However, Close to You is nearly four minutes in length. That’s too long just for a promotional YouTube teaser to drum up excitement for a game, but Nintendo also doesn’t regularly do long in-game cutscenes. If Close to You were going to be included in a Pikmin 4 re-release, you’d expect for there to eventually be Pikmin shown in CG animation too, but that would mean even more uncharacteristically long cutscenes in a Nintendo game.

So if Close to You is part of something bigger that eventually does show Pikmin, but that’d be too many cutscenes for a Nintendo game, maybe this really is somehow related to Nintendo’s partnership with Illumination, or its overall interest in adapting its games as movies. Between the Super Mario Galaxy Movie and the also in-production live-action Legend of Zelda movie, Nintendo already has two big-spectacle stories in the works, so trying something a little more laid-back in tone for a third project has some logic to it. Pikmin doesn’t have quite the same dramatic punch as some of the company’s other franchises, but an animated short that’s longer than the four-minute video, but still shorter than feature-length, could make a nice opening act to show at the start of screenings of the Galaxy movie.

For the time being, though, Nintendo is only saying as much about Close to You’s true identity as the video’s characters do.

Source: YouTube/Nintendo 公式チャンネル, Twitter/@Nintendo
Images: YouTube/Nintendo 公式チャンネル
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