Nintendo to Acquire Dynamo Pictures; Accelerates Interest in Animation

Timogotchi19 · Jul 15, 2022

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2022/220714e.pdf
Yesterday, news broke out that Nintendo is planning to acquire Dynamo Pictures, a Tokyo-based CGI animation company, by October of this year and renaming it "Nintendo Pictures" with the intent to accelerate its foray into the realms of animation.

Dynamo provided motion capture for Neir, Death Stranding, Monster Hunter: World, Persona 5, and Lost Odyssey, and have been involved with the production of Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance, among many others, as listed here:
For Nintendo, they previously animated the cutscenes for Metroid: Other M as well as the Pikmin short movies.

All different kinds of speculation has been made amongst people familiar with Nintendo on what this could mean; a common one is in regards to the upcoming Super Mario animated movie that Nintendo is making alongside Illumination that's slated to release next spring. A handful of people, including myself at first, are saying that Nintendo is attempting to bail out of future endeavors with Illumination and making future movies on their own terms, whether its because of the controversy surrounding Chris Pratt being casted as Mario in said movie or if the way Illumination was handling the movie wasn't meeting their standards.

Admittedly, the production of the Mario movie is weird, especially with this news. Its supposed to release next spring after being delayed from its original release this holiday, but details about it are still very scarce. All we know is that Chris Meledandri (Illumination's CEO and co-producer of their films) and Shigeru Miyamoto will be co-producing it, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (the creators of Teen Titans Go!) are directing it, and the cast is as follows:

Chris Pratt as Mario
Charlie Day as Luigi
Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach
Keegan-Michael Key as Toad
Jack Black as Bowser
Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek
Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong
Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong
Sebastian Maniscalco as Foreman Spike
Charles Martinet in undisclosed cameo roles

As of this thread's posting, we don't have a trailer, poster, or even know what the final name for the movie will be. On the other hand, Chris Meledandri is apart of Nintendo's board of directors as of 2021, and he and Miyamoto have said nothing but positive things about each other, even referring to one another by the -san Japanese suffix.

My best informed guess is that Nintendo is going to use Dynamo to amp up the quality of cutscenes for their future games and/or have them be their go-to for short series and/or full-on television series, and, in continuation with their alliance with Universal, release said series on Peacock, Universal Kids, and/or SyFy, and still turn to Universal directly for big-budget movies, splitting adaptation rights to their IPs between Illumination and DreamWorks Animation (which Universal bought in 2016), working with the former on cartoony IPs like Mario, Kirby, and Splatoon and the latter on more structured IPs like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Star Fox. Again, as the acquisition has just been announced, the only ones that know the full extent of Nintendo's future plans for visual content are Nintendo themselves.

TamagotchiLover16 · Aug 3, 2022

Timogotchi19 said:
https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2022/220714e.pdf
Yesterday, news broke out that Nintendo is planning to acquire Dynamo Pictures, a Tokyo-based CGI animation company, by October of this year and renaming it "Nintendo Pictures" with the intent to accelerate its foray into the realms of animation.

Dynamo provided motion capture for Neir, Death Stranding, Monster Hunter: World, Persona 5, and Lost Odyssey, and have been involved with the production of Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance, among many others, as listed here:
For Nintendo, they previously animated the cutscenes for Metroid: Other M as well as the Pikmin short movies.

All different kinds of speculation has been made amongst people familiar with Nintendo on what this could mean; a common one is in regards to the upcoming Super Mario animated movie that Nintendo is making alongside Illumination that's slated to release next spring. A handful of people, including myself at first, are saying that Nintendo is attempting to bail out of future endeavors with Illumination and making future movies on their own terms, whether its because of the controversy surrounding Chris Pratt being casted as Mario in said movie or if the way Illumination was handling the movie wasn't meeting their standards.

Admittedly, the production of the Mario movie is weird, especially with this news. Its supposed to release next spring after being delayed from its original release this holiday, but details about it are still very scarce. All we know is that Chris Meledandri (Illumination's CEO and co-producer of their films) and Shigeru Miyamoto will be co-producing it, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (the creators of Teen Titans Go!) are directing it, and the cast is as follows:

Chris Pratt as Mario

Charlie Day as Luigi

Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach

Keegan-Michael Key as Toad

Jack Black as Bowser

Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek

Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong

Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong

Sebastian Maniscalco as Foreman Spike

Charles Martinet in undisclosed cameo roles

As of this thread's posting, we don't have a trailer, poster, or even know what the final name for the movie will be. On the other hand, Chris Meledandri is apart of Nintendo's board of directors as of 2021, and he and Miyamoto have said nothing but positive things about each other, even referring to one another by the -san Japanese suffix.

My best informed guess is that Nintendo is going to use Dynamo to amp up the quality of cutscenes for their future games and/or have them be their go-to for short series and/or full-on television series, and, in continuation with their alliance with Universal, release said series on Peacock, Universal Kids, and/or SyFy, and still turn to Universal directly for big-budget movies, splitting adaptation rights to their IPs between Illumination and DreamWorks Animation (which Universal bought in 2016), working with the former on cartoony IPs like Mario, Kirby, and Splatoon and the latter on more structured IPs like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Star Fox. Again, as the acquisition has just been announced, the only ones that know the full extent of Nintendo's future plans for visual content are Nintendo themselves.

Surprising!

The gotchi noob · Oct 20, 2022

But nintendo keeps shutting down servers and shop i dont trust them..... I'm bored in animal crossing wild world:/

decepticoncrown · Oct 20, 2022

Not sure how this will affect the properties this company has worked on in the past, but I'm excited about what this could do for Nintendo. It seems that they are very happy with the results of the Mario movie. If this means television adaptations of some of their games, I'd be very excited about that!

It would be cool if they used this company in favor of cutscenes. A lot of the Switch games' cutscenes have been lackluster, IMO.