Sonic The Hedghog

Back before this movie released I insinuated pretty uh... heavily, that this was going to be a bad movie. I may have compared it to the sewers of Hell, and lumped it in with a pretty broad crowd of movies based on video games that are, to put it lightly, not very good.

Simply put, I was wrong. The movie isn't a narrative masterpiece or anything like that, but it is fun, it looks good, and in particular it targeted a specific age group and I think it did exactly what it needed to do to entertain them and try and say something true about friendship. It's not complicated, it's not deep, but it is, after all is said and done, a good movie. Even all of the performances were solid, in particular I really liked getting back to a properly manic Jim Carrey. Always great fun. I was pleasantly surprised all around, and I can in good conscience recommend Sonic to the same crowd that liked Detective Pikachu. But we do need to address the elephant in the room.

If they hadn't redesigned Sonic's character model, my review would be completely different.

Look, this isn't complicated. Even if the rest of the movie had been effectively identical, having the uncanny-valley spawned creature that was in the first trailer on screen for the duration would have seriously harshed my buzz. I suspect I'm not alone.

Imagine it this way. Would you have reacted the same way to the character of Indiana Jones if he'd been played by someone else instead of Harrison "The Harrison Fordiest" Ford? Like, if instead of being played by the rougishly handsome space cowboy (or the original casting choice of Tom "The 70's Mustache" Selleck) the roll had gone to a severely anemic bear with mange. Would that have altered the viewing experience a little? Perhaps made you feel a little less of a connection with the character?

Marion: "I was only a child!"

Jones: "MmmrrRRAAAWWWRRRrrr!" (swipes wildly at the hunger bees with massive furless paws)

I'm not going for any kind of authoritative statement here, but movies are a visual medium, and we have pretty well defined touch-stones for what kinds of visuals are going to inspire what kinds of interactions from the viewing public. The characters in kids movies, in particular, skew heavily towards some kind of "cute", while the initial character design for Sonic skewed more towards some kind of "horror". Sonic, as a character, isn't even pretending to play in the realm of reality, and so going for a "realistically" proportioned character is going to set off all kinds of primal alarm bells in our heads. We've got proof of that, in fact, given the pretty much universal revulsion to the original character design.

Whoever is responsible for that design... I hope you're taking notes. Or having your roomba take notes for you, given it might be better at handling a pencil.

There's another elephant inside the elephant we're currently exploring named Rocket Raccoon. His character design doesn't lean on the cute-ness trifecta of "big head, big eyes, big hands" the way video-game Sonic does, and yet nobody freaked out about him. In fact, he looks downright realistic. Why is that?

I'd hazard a guess that it might have something to do with the fact that raccoons do, in point of fact, look like that. He's basically just a raccoon with a really skinny torso. Nothing too crazy there. Hedgehogs don't uh... I mean, you have seen these things, right? The only time Sonic looks anything remotely like a hedgehog is when he's curled up into a ball. Honestly if the "realistic" design for Sonic had basically made him into a huge, blue, actual hedgehog with red shoes that walks around kinda slumped over, the game fans would have freaked out but the rest of us would have probably been down with it. 

It was when they took the generically "cute" humanized character that was only ever tangentially related to a hedgehog anyways and decided to A) remove the entire cute-ness trifecta and B) make it look more human but not enough human to not actually come out looking like the new big-bad in a three-quel of Chucky that issues stated to crop up. Legs too skinny for his torso but somehow also not long enough for his height. Defined, regular-looking shoulders attached to a cartoonishly over-sized head. Eye-to-face proportions that made him look more like the aliens from Independence Day than a person. It's a cascade of terrible ideas that looks like it was assembled by an AI tasked with drawing a human after having been shown nothing but pictures of socks.

Also, dude's wearing no pants and tennis shoes with tall socks. Freaking why?

So no, this movie, being a visual medium as most movies are, was never going to work with a character design for Sonic that was so hugely mis-matched from the actual tone and target audience of the rest of the film. Do I feel bad for the probably under-compensated digital artists who had to work long hours for months in order to make the change happen? Yes. I'm sorry guys. But seriously your work is massively appreciated.

Y'all saved this movie from the graveyard of video game adaptations. Absolute heroes.