In one of its strangest moves yet, Nintendo has posted a random animated short about a baby, with no explanation of what it’s for.
For better or worse, the inner workings of Nintendo have long been inscrutable. It won’t announce a new 3D Super Mario game for the franchise’s 40th anniversary, but it will resurrect the justifiably maligned Virtual Boy and charge you over £67 for the privilege.
If you thought Nintendo shadow-dropping a new Fire Emblem mobile game in the middle of the night was peak strangeness, then you clearly haven’t seen the company’s newest trailer.
Uploaded to its Nintendo Today app and other social platforms on Tuesday, the video is titled Close To You, with zero indication of what it’s advertising.
The short video is a 3D animation centred on a baby that’s left alone in their room by their mother, only for some kind of invisible entity to mess with the toys and steal the baby’s dummy.
The baby happily chases it around the room, before the mum returns and is thrilled to see her baby learning to walk. And that’s literally it. The animation isn’t cheap; if anything, it looks like a lot of money has gone into making it look as good as possible. But… to what purpose?
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Nintendo must be teasing something important enough to the company for it to spend the money on this trailer, but without any familiar iconography, or even a video description, it just comes across as a random animated short.
Is Nintendo teasing Pikmin 5?
Of course, this is the internet, so people have already come to their own conclusions and suspect Nintendo is hinting at something big. The most popular theory is that this is Pikmin related, with some suggesting the music uses leitmotifs heard in the Pikmin games.
Pikmin don’t appear anywhere in the trailer, although some suspect one can be briefly seen in the background at around the 1:39 mark. Look at the background and you can see something tiny walking under the crib, but it’s far too blurry to make out.
Pikmin are famously tiny creatures that pick stuff up, but they’ve never been invisible before… unless this is a new breed of Pikmin for Pikmin 5. Series producer Takashi Tezuka did suggest a new sequel was on the cards though and Pikmin 4 sold a lot better than previous entries, especially in Japan.
Some fans have added that augmented reality game Pikmin Bloom states that Pikmin are invisible to humans, which lines up with the trailer, alhough considering it’s a spin-off, it’s difficult to tell if this is new lore or something that exists to justify why Pikmin only appear in AR on your mobile phone.
Plus, humans have never appeared in the mainline Pikmin games. There have been theories that the planet Pikmin live on is a post-apocalyptic Earth, and objects like the ones in the baby’s room have appeared in Pikmin 4, but it’s always been left purposefully ambiguous.
Given the calibre of the animation, which to us does look reminiscent of the work of Illumination (the same animation company Nintendo’s partnered with for the Super Mario Bros. movies), some have suggested it’s hinting at a Pikmin movie. But it’s hard to imagine that being Nintendo’s next port of call after Mario and The Legend Of Zelda.
The trailer could also have been handled by Nintendo’s own animation studio, Nintendo Pictures, which previously made several Pikmin short movies exclusive to the Wii U and 3DS, though they’ve since been re-released on YouTube. Maybe Nintendo’s simply getting back into making those?
Is Nintendo teasing the Super Mario Galaxy movie?
The other prevalent theory floating around is that this is a secret teaser for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which releases on April 3 next year.
While there’s nothing to suggest the teaser is set in the Mario universe, some believe the baby is actually the character of Rosalina and what we’re seeing is a glimpse into her backstory, ahead of her appearance in the film.
Although she’s not formally confirmed, Rosalina is pretty much guaranteed to make an appearance in the movie, considering she debuted in the original Super Mario Galaxy game, and there were even hints towards her presence in the first movie.
However, the theory seems dependent on the baby having blond hair and wearing blue, just like Rosalina, which feels like a stretch to us. By that logic, this could also be a baby Samus from Metroid.
Is Nintendo teasing something else?
We did almost suspect this was hinting at a new Chibi-Robo! game, since that series involves a tiny character doing odd jobs around the house. But that’s extremely unlikely since Nintendo’s never put this much effort into the series before.
Plus, there hasn’t been a new game in 10 years and aside from re-releasing the original GameCube game for the Nintendo Switch 2’s online library, Nintendo’s shown little interest in revisiting the series.
Nintendo has never properly announced the secret online game it ran playtests for on Switch, but we suspect the two are unrelated. According to datamines and people willing to break NDA, the game involved working with other players to farm resources and build planets, with no mention of invisible helpers or babies.
Perhaps the most obvious answer is that this is hinting at something entirely original. Like a Nintendogs style project but about raising babies rather than puppies (Nintenbabies, if you will).
Whatever the case, it has got people talking, which can only be good news for Nintendo.
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