I almost forgot that one of the video game related things I did over the winter break was that I finally got around to watching the three animated Pikmin short films. The films were originally announced around the same time that Pikmin 3 was released on Wii U back in 2013, and it took something like a year before they actually debuted. The three films were released on both Wii U and 3DS for $5 a pop, which seemed a bit steep to me at the time. It was only a few months ago that Nintendo released them all on YouTube.
It's always fun to see Nintendo IP come to life in other forms of media, and it's still quite a rarity when it happens. The three films are 2 minutes, 8 minutes, and almost 13 minutes, and their uniqueness and quality increase with their length. The first one is quite short and is more of a gag than a film. The second is mostly a lot of slaptick-y type of humor that we've seen in many a cartoon, but incorporating the Pikmin does keep it feeling more fresh than it would otherwise. The third one feels the most complete and is definitely the most worthwhile of the bunch. It doesn't have much in the way of plot, but it's much more ambitious in terms of its scope, and there's lot of action and scores of Pikmin running around.
Overall this was a fun way to spend a half hour in the Pikmin universe. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed Pikmin 3 when I played it back in 2016, and although Pikmin 3 Deluxe came out on Switch recently (the same time the films were put on YouTube), I'm still looking forward to when its inevitable sequel is released.