White Pill: Sonic and One of Hollywood's Biggest Saves

The imperfect path to perfection

Let me tell you about one of the greatest saves in modern movie history.

I had not thought about the Sonic the Hedgehog movies since spring of 2019, when the original trailer came out and was the worst thing that ever existed.

It got hundreds of thousands of dislikes and there was extreme online public outcry. Everybody hated it.

The problem was that Sonic both did not look like he did in the games, and did look like a terrifying mutant fox:

Why!

It was originally set to be released November 15, 2019. It was so bad that they went back into production to fix it and delayed release until February.

The director issued this tweet, and if you check out this link, you will see a lot of artists joyfully poking fun and helpfully showing their own redesigns.

I have not heard one peep about this movie since then — other than they did fix it and it was released on time. I did not even realize they made more of them.

I also had not heard one peep about the movies being…

…perfect.

How did they get something major so wrong, but everything else so right?

After they got Sonic wrong, I had lost all interest. I imagined I would watch it sometime a few years down the line. I generally don’t like action movies (except Barb Wire) and if they got something so major wrong, I figured it probably wasn’t going to be good in other ways too.

Well, five years passed, and I have now watched the three films this week. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 came out recently and features Shadow, possible my favorite character of all time, and so the movies got back on my radar.

The verdict…

they are basically perfect movies

Shadow the Hedgehog: The perfect combination of strong and tormented. Voiced by Keanu Reeves

I sat in awe at what these people had managed to accomplish.

You have to understand that these Sonic movies were hard to do. The idea to make a Sonic movie goes back to 1993 — and so it was not actually done until almost 30 years later. Licensing always means paperwork, trading ownership, and headaches. And then making a movie from a popular video game, if done incorrectly, risks hurting the brand rather than helping.

The live-action version in 2020 is also the first Sonic movie, period. There were two seasons of an animated series in 1993, but never a movie.

What this means is that between the public fiasco in 2019 and me “getting around to finally watching it,” an entire Sonic cinematic universe was instantiated.

Sonic the Hedgehog - February 14, 2020

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - April 8, 2022

Knuckles - April 26, 2024

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - December 20, 2024

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - March 19, 2027

What was hard?

I did wonder — why not make an animated movie? Why go straight into live action?

In the games, the characters inhabit the human world (there is no alien planet at all—no fictional setting to try to replicate), and so showing this in a movie using live-action does make sense. In the animated series, I remember not finding the animated humans particularly compelling compared to the animal friends.

An attempt to problem-solve by using live-action does make sense — it goes around this problem in that humans automatically feel a lot of kinship watching live humans — and then the CGI animals are cute.

It does create the dual challenge of the humans needing to be a little bit cartoonish, and the cartoons needing to be a little bit humanish.

Fortunately for everybody involved in the project, the most cartoonish actor alive, Jim Carrey, agreed to play Doctor Robotnik — which is fortunate because it seems like Jim Carrey was born to play this role.

Jim Carrey as Doctor Robotnik, or “Eggman”

Idris Elba voicing Knuckles, and Keanu Reeves voicing Shadow also helps.

James Marsden also does a spectacular job in his role as “the donut lord” — the main human best friend of Sonic, and at 51, captures the right ratio of fun and wisdom.

Everybody playing their roles well was important because all the charm of the movies depends on the interplay between the characters — the dialogue between the heroes and villains, and the central story involving a deep friendship between Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles.

Creating convincing relationships when the central characters are CGI is not trivial!

Furthermore, the characters can be annoying without each other.

Sonic is already a bit annoying in the games with his perpetual optimism unless he has somebody to play off of. (This is balanced by enough bad things happening to him.)

Knuckles is very serious, and does not have much breadth unless he is interacting with friends.

Tails might be even *more* optimistic than Sonic, and needs to be bouncing his mind off something.

Shadow is SAD and needs to be spurred into banter or introspection for his variety to shine through.

Doctor Robotnik is a genius madman and needs a foe, or else his life would be him doing whatever he wants.

How many feelings do I have?

As a hardcore Sonic fan — this is the first time that I had the experience of being extremely moved by a movie adaptation of something I like. I had not had this experience with movies before. There was never a book or another video game that I had spent *this* amount of time with. Perhaps if they make a film adaptation of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas…

It hit certain nostalgia chords and embodied tactile senses I did not realize I had to see Sonic curl up into a ball like in the games, or to see Knuckles climb a wall like in the games.

The people involved in the project really paid a lot of attention to the details!

Given that they did everything right — “how did they get Sonic so wrong, then?” is a question that potentially is not that complicated, in the end.

From interviews, it seems like animators were solving a lot of hard problems around “how is Sonic going to interact in the physical world” and didn’t realize how bad it was until the backlash. And there are always time pressures in the film and animation industries.

But I do wonder now how many things are out there that are really good, but some key element was done incorrectly or not finished and never finished or pointed out, either by social media or by a Tails + Knuckles style friendship crew.