'The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask' has never bothered to hide the Tolkien-inspired power the mask has, and this new short film uses the temptation of the mask to deliver a new story in the world of Termina, one of the darkest, and most subversive creations that Nintendo has ever made.
A group of highly talented animators named Emberlab have recently taken YouTube by storm. With 'The Legend of Zelda' series already having such a huge fanbase, and with the outstanding quality of the video, it's not surprising that in just a few short days, the video has accumulated almost a million and a half views.
In the video, titled 'Majora's Mask - Terrible Fate', we discover the origin of Skull Kid, the primary antagonist of the video game. We see how he encounters the mask and how it tempts him, just as the Ring did with Smeagol/Gollum in Middle-earth. Before finding the mask, Skull Kid is shown to be light hearted and free willed, dancing around the forest with two fairies. However, this doesn't last, and with the sky growing dark, and the music turning ominous, Skull Kid is seized by the mask, letting out a scream as he becomes possessed. The tone of the video is very similar to that of the game, which has widely been accredited for being the darkest 'Legend of Zelda' in the series
Unfortunately,'The Legend of Zelda' is a top priority series within Nintendo (whose only realistic competition for the throne is 'Mario'); so investing hours of work on a proposal of this magnitude is very high risk, since Nintendo is incredibly infamous for quickly knocking down all kinds of amateur creations. The creators of Super Mario are almost paranoid with the intellectual property of their work, as a few days ago they asked the organizers of 'The Game Awards' to eliminate the nominations of two fan-games inspired by their licenses.
To put this into perspective, the Game Awards are considered the Oscars of video games, where once every year awards are distributed in a gala with all the pomp and circumstance that one would come to expect from American award ceremonies. One of the categories refers to fan-games, and in the list where two titles based upon 'Metroid' and 'Pokémon'.
Although these creations weren't for any profit, Nintendo still managed to make their applications disappear distressingly quickly. With these precedents, which are just a couple of examples from a long list, it would be surprising if this short remained much longer on YouTube. Unfortunately.
Nintendo's plans to take its series to the big screen
On the other hand, it could also be the first step in a new direction, since Nintendo has been thinking about taking advantage of their licenses in other areas outside of video games. You've probably heard of the horrible 'Super Mario' movie (Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, 1993), but that production seems to have left a scar and eliminated any interest at all Nintendo had to continue to make films. However, after the recent failure of Wii U, the Japanese company has begun to look for new commercial channels for its licenses, and one of the likely paths seems to be film and television. For a long time it was rumored that Nintendo had reached an agreement with Netflix to produce content based precisely on the saga 'Zelda', but those rumors were sadly denied. However, Tatsumi Kimishima, the company's current president, said that we would see animated films of Nintendo characters in the medium term. Of course, for now there are no details of which series, animation studies involved, or specific dates. But there's still hope.