I have a theory that "anime" may have been a mistranslation. Kimishima may have actually said "animation," which is not the same as anime as we know it in the west. I was doing some research, and if you remember the Pikmin shorts, Minamoto said that if those were successful, he would consider giving other Nintendo franchises the same treatment.
Whatever, right? Well, not quite. The company responsible for animating those shorts, Dwango Pictures, Inc., had 1.5% of their stock purchased by Nintendo at the end of 2013 at the request of the leader of that company. This is a deliberate monetary investment on Nintendo's behalf with a company with clear recourses and talent for CGI animation. And they're Japanese.
What's more, the visual style displayed in the Pikmin shorts perfectly match the sort of "Smash Bros." unified art style of Nintendo characters. I haven't found any leads, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Dwango was also responsible for most of the Smash Bros. cutscenes in Smash 4 as well.
If this is what Kimishima was really alluding to, I think it would be a much better business move than traditional anime. As much as I adore anime, it's an extremely niche form of media in the west. Nintendo is expanding their brands to television and film as a way to expose their IP to a wider audience, and doing that with traditional anime is unnecessarily bottlenecking the reach of these shows.
The absolutely massive success of films like Frozen in Japan is proof that they like CGI animation just fine over there, so going that route would be a much more successful business move for them worldwide. Especially if all of the TV shows and films were unified under the same "smash bros" art style, they could cultivate their very own Nintendo Cinematic universe for themselves.
Just imagine a Super Mario Bros. movie in the Smash Bros. cutscene art style where Mario is saving Luigi from Bowser or something, and it has the same epic feel and soundtrack as Galaxy. Now imagine the same for a The Legend of Zelda movie. The same for a Metroid movie. And a Star Fox TV show. And a Kid Icarus show, etc. All in that Pikmin shorts/smash 4 CGI unified art style. And then they tie it all together with a Toy-Story-meets-The Avengers-like Super Smash Bros. movie. Absolutely epic.
Though even with all that said, I'd kill for a Fire Emblem "anime" show in the style of those cutscenes. They're beautiful.
EDIT: Looking more closely and comparing the two, I'm absolutely convinced now that Dwango is responsivble for most of the Smash Bros cutscenes. The Pikmin and Olimar are rendered identically.
