Nintendo snaps up animation studio – will probably help with future movies

metro.co.uk:

Dynamo Pictures will soon be Nintendo Pictures and is expected to solely work on the company’s future movie and animation projects.

Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo doesn’t seem especially eager to snap up other game studios to absorb into its collective. Its biggest buy out in recent memory was Next Level Games, which already had an extremely close working relationship with Nintendo.

Now, the company’s next acquisition isn’t even of a game developer, but instead an animation studio called Dynamo Pictures.

It won’t be called that for much longer, though, as Nintendo plans on renaming it to Nintendo Pictures once the acquisition closes on October 3.

As for why Nintendo wants it to become a subsidiary of the company, it’s to ‘strengthen the planning and production structure of visual content in the Nintendo group.’

While this could apply to animated cut scenes for future games, ‘visual content’ could also be a broad term for animated movies and TV shows.

Nintendo has publicly shared the notification of the acquisition and you can read it here, but it doesn’t reveal much else.

The most surprising aspect of the acquisition is that Dynamo Pictures has only worked with Nintendo a couple of times before. It did the 2014 Pikmin short movies and, according to MobyGames, assisted with the cut scenes for 2010’s Metroid: Other M.

A quick scout through its website shows that it has partnered with several other studios. Some examples include at least one of Capcom’s 3D animated Resident Evil movies, as well as motion capture work for Atlus’ Persona 5 and Square Enix’s Nier Replicant.

With it to become a wholly owned subsidiary, Nintendo has effectively cut it off from other companies, so the likes of Square Enix and Capcom will need to look