When the first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog released in early 2019, the reaction was not great, to say the least. The look of the titular character was off in a way that turned off even casual fans of the video game series – it was firmly in the uncanny valley due to the attempted “realistic” nature of the design. Fortunately for everyone, the design team went back to the drawing board, hired one of the best Sonic artists in the business (Tyson Hesse) to lead a redesign, and the resulting film means that audiences get a remarkably fun time with a character that looks like he’s supposed to.
In the film, Sonic is a blue hedgehog from another world gifted with powers, including his superspeed. After fleeing his home world at a young age, he comes to Earth and hides out for several years. In a moment of frustration, his powers are let loose, alerting the government to his presence. In order to flee to a safer world, Sonic tries to use his rings – which can be used to create portals between worlds – to escape. But he’s found by Tom Wachowski, the sheriff of Green Hills, and hit with a tranquilizer, inadvertently sending Sonic’s entire bag of rings to San Francisco through a portal of his own making. With the government and Doctor Robotnik hot on his trail, Sonic teams up with Tom in order to get to San Francisco, find his rings, and escape from Earth before he can be captured and experimented upon.
On his road trip to California, Sonic realizes that he’s come to love his time spent on Earth in spite of the fact that he’s been in hiding – and accordingly, terribly lonely – the entire time. With Tom’s help, Sonic manages to form a bucket list for the time he’s got left, and the two are able to become fast friends as Sonic explores what it means to just enjoy life.
The acting in the film might not be garnering any Academy Award nominations, but the performances from James Marsden as Tom and Tika Sumpter as Maddie are solid – the two are sort of the “straight” characters that both Sonic and Robotnik are playing off of throughout the story. Meanwhile, Ben Schwartz as the voice (and some facial motion capture) of Sonic is fabulous. He adds his own flair to the voice that’s unique to him and doesn’t at all make it sound like he’s simply trying to imitate any of the previous actors who have voiced Sonic over the years. There’s a certain childlike earnestness about Sonic in this film that helps to balance out the occasionally-obnoxious fast-talking smart aleck part of his personality.
Jim Carrey as Robotnik was the smartest casting decision the studio could have possibly made. He’s absolutely perfect for the role, and the result is exactly the kind of Jim Carrey comedic performance you want in 2020. He’s weird and a little unhinged and over the top, but never in a way that gets explicitly annoying; he really chews the scenery in every frame he’s in, and he’s got some of the absolute best lines in the film.
It’d be hard to talk about this film without discussing the effects, as Sonic is a CG character in an otherwise live-action, real world. In addition to the completely necessary redesign that made Sonic look more like himself, the way in which the character interacts with the environment around him is remarkably realistic. There isn’t any weirdness where actors don’t look like they’re looking quite at him, and his direct interactions with the human characters look incredible. The redesign itself is incredible – Sonic is, simply put, very cute. Thanks to the motion capture of Ben Schwartz, you get a real feel for the kind of subtle and complex emotions that Sonic experiences over the course of the story, and it results in making it that much easier to root for the little guy.
There are definitely some occasional groan-worthy moments in terms of the writing, where it sometimes feels as though someone’s dad was trying to write a story for the “kids these days” using only jokes that he’s heard secondhand through some Facebook post. Aside from that though, it’s a script that’s well-done and contemporary, and if you’re keyed into some of the classic Sonic meme humor, you’ll find an extra layer to some scenes as well. The only thing I thought the film was missing was more tunes taken from the games themselves – there’s a lovely little piano arrangement of the classic Green Hills theme heard towards the end of the film (performed by the incomparable Jon Batiste), but I felt that there were some places where more of the game franchise’s memorable tunes could have been incorporated.
In spite of not directly adapting any of the Sonic video games, the film is simply a wildly fun, wholesome good time from start to finish. It stays true to the core of who the characters are and goes to show that being faithful to the source material as much as possible can result in video game stories making for really good movies. Sonic the Hedgehog is clearly setting up for a sequel, and after the kind of debut that this film made, I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Sonic the Hedgehog speeds into theaters on February 14, 2020.
