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© D3EditorThe translation of Nintendo’s recent question-and-answer meeting with shareholders has been released and shows the official translation of comments from company chairman Shuntaro Furukawa and representative director and colleague Shigeru Miyamoto on the appointment of Chris Meledandri as ” non-executive external director “of the company, news that broke in May this year.
As explained by Furukawa, Meledandri is the founder of Illumination Entertainment, holding responsible for the Despicable Me series and partner with Nintendo on the upcoming Super Mario film project.
In keeping with the tone of the question-and-answer session, Furukawa’s comments were pretty catch-all (you can read them in the translation itself), but Shigeru Miyamoto opened up a bit more (the emphasis is on the little) on the effect the board hopes Meledandri’s contribution will have on upcoming “video content” and related projects. He also explained how the idea of expanding Mario to cinema came after experiments with mobile games showed the potential to reach audiences that Nintendo’s game systems couldn’t:
While this has no direct connection to his directorial appointment, I’ve been working with Chris for over five years now on the Super Mario movie. Through this relationship, I think he really understood Nintendo’s point of view. I don’t think it’s easy for those involved in media making overseas to understand Nintendo’s way of thinking, but Chris really understands why Nintendo creates characters and visual content.
We are working on mobile and visual content to expand our integrated hardware-software entertainment business globally. Working on mobile content has reminded us yet again that while Nintendo game consoles may have reached certain parts of the world, there are many places where they are not prevalent. We started the mobile business because we thought it was very important to do activities that encourage people to understand the Nintendo brand and love Nintendo. It also raised awareness of the importance of visual content. By owning video content and not just games, Nintendo will be able to further expand its content across the world and become stronger as a business. The fact that we are a video game development company tends to create the mistaken impression that we can also create movies easily. It’s true that the visual content creation and game development processes share some of the same ways of thinking, but there are differences as well. The film industry, including distribution, is in a period of transformation. In this context, we think that asking Chris for advice, as an expert with many years of experience in Hollywood, will be of great help to us in the future.
The Super Mario movie is still in production with a release slated for 2022, and Nintendo has said in the past how it envisions animations for its other characters beyond Mario and his gang. It looks like there are some big multimedia projects going on for the company’s all-star team, including – perhaps – a Donkey Kong project. Fingers crossed, we’ll know more soon.
Elsewhere in the Q&A, Miyamoto opened up about his obsession with Pokémon GO and the people interviewed on the Nintendo board revealed their favorite games.
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