Based on nothing more than a couple of recently-posted .gifs, the animated Legend of Zelda fan project from Tumblr user Penciltest has me very, very intrigued.

Penciltest, a self-described “video game animator guy,” posted the still above as well as a pair of what appear to be .gifs of a CG animated project, without any further information. We’ll find a way to reach out and see what additional details he might have about the still nascent project.

Hopefully, he’ll be able to see it to fruition without any interference from Nintendo.

Some missteps aside, Nintendo has been very careful with their characters and franchises over the last 20 years. Putting aside the Super Mario Bros./CD-I games period, they’ve been really deliberate about how Mario, Link, Donkey Kong and Samus are licensed out. They’ve been so deliberate, in fact, that it’s almost hard to imagine them green lighting an actual film based on one of their characters ever again.

Series producer Eiji Aonuma holds out hope that an interactive Zelda movie might be in the cards someday. Speaking with Kotaku last year, Auonuma said:

“If we were to make a Zelda title, if we had interest in doing that, I think really what would be most important to us is to be able to play with the format of a movie, make it more interactive, like you’re able to take your 3DS into the theater and that leads you into participating in it somehow. We wouldn’t want to make it the same as any other movie. We want to somehow change what a movie is.”

Until then, we’ll simply have projects like Penciltest’s to tide us over.

HT: Game Informer