Nintendo's Mysterious New Pixar-Esque Short Could Have a Pikmin Connection

Nintendo is no stranger to puzzles, but its latest one is a real head-scratcher. Out of absolutely nowhere, Nintendo released a Pixar-esque animated short on its YouTube channel called “Close to You,” and posted the video on all its socials with zero extra context or information. It’s a delightfully adorable short featuring a baby and their mother, but we have pretty much no idea what it’s for right now. But there are some interesting little details hidden throughout that could give us at least an idea, and the most likely candidate right now seems to be Pikmin.

In “Close to You,” we see a mother playing with her infant before she leaves to check on a knock at the door. After she’s left, items in the room start floating on their own, including the baby’s pacifier, toy blocks, and more.

As the baby follows the items, they stand up and almost fall over before being caught by the mother. The entire thing is set to surprisingly gorgeous piano music, and that’s where our first hint comes in. At 3:14, the music crescendos into a leitmotif that sounds remarkably similar to the Pikmin theme. Just listen to it, and then the first ten seconds of this video, and compare.

Of course, the items sort of bobbing along as they move is extremely similar to how Pikmin carry items in the games — just lacking the actual creatures. Interestingly, the mobile game Pikmin Bloom did give us the lore tidbit that, canonically, Pikmin are invisible to humans.

But there are even more details that might be clues. At 1:39, you can see a little red item move under the crib. It’s blurry, so it’s hard to tell exactly what it is, but it does match the color of the Red Pikmin. And this last detail might be nothing, but when the mother leaves the room at 24 seconds, the door closing sounds almost exactly like the iconic Pikmin squeak.

It definitely feels like the short is Pikmin-related, but even so, we don’t have any idea what it’s for. The animation definitely looks similar to the Illumination Super Mario movie, but not quite the same. Some have speculated it could be a kind of origin story for the movie version of Rosalina, due to the baby’s color scheme being the same, and the crib mobile having a star theme. But that seems shaky at best.

It’s also worth noting that a couple of months ago, Nintendo announced a line of baby products called “My Mario.” It’s possible this could be promoting that, but it seems like a pretty lavish production for that alone.

The last time Nintendo dropped something out of the blue like this was roughly a year ago, with a 16-second video that led to the announcement of Emio: The Smiling Man — but notably, that still had the ESRB rating. Without any kind of ESRB elements, it seems unlikely that this is for a video game.

The most viable option, then, is a tease for new animated shorts, or perhaps even a new animated film. Roughly four years ago, Nintendo released a handful of animated Pikmin shorts, showing the little creatures getting up to a variety of hijinks.

As Nintendo continues to pursue more multimedia projects, including the sequel to the Mario movie and the live-action Zelda movie, it’s obvious that some kind of television series would be in the cards.

Pikmin seems like the perfect fit for that kind of thing out of all of Nintendo’s franchises, outside of maybe Splatoon. That’s especially true considering Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto has previously said Pikmin is his favorite creation, and he’d love to see it grow further. While right now all we can do is speculate, I doubt it’ll be long until we find out what Close to You is really all about.