Taken from Wii Blog:
http://www.wiiblog.net/Those of you who think Nintendo should have more original characters should be happy with the news below.
According to an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, who has a big influence on popular Nintendo franchises such as Zelda and Mario games, said that Nintendo will release a video game next year with a cast of all new characters.
He was quoted in Nintendojo’s article saying, “maybe next year sometime, we may have new characters in the same way we came up with Pikmin when we introduced the GameCube.”
Therefore, we do not have any idea yet whether these new characters will be humans (like Mario characters), animals (like Pokemons), or a combination. Maybe the characters will look like aliens from outer space. Who knows?
They may also decide to create more realistic human characters (such as the Zelda games) rather than cartoony human characters (such as Mario games). After all, Nintendo already has a lot of characters targeted toward a young audience. Just play any Smash Bros. game and you can tell that the realistic human characters are highly outnumbered.
One thing that I know of is that this game will get high ratings based on Nintendo’s history of creating new franchise games.
It has been a while since we've gotten some new and true Nintendo characters to the family. They hinted that it would make sense if it were a realistic human, with all of the animal-based characters they have. But at the same time, they do animal characters a lot, so this could just be another one of those.