Sonic the Hedgehog movie got some of the fierce and negative reviews after its trailer launch, director Jeff Fowler revealed that Paramount will be changing the blue hedgehog’s design for the final cut of the movie. It was such a bad design I don’t know who approved that monstrosity, many people are thrilled about this news. Not just fans, but Sonic’s co-creator Yuji Naka has also appreciated the edit in the movie and change of the design of the main character, Sonic.
The power of sonic fans is amazing. It is good to go in a good direction. Thank you so much for loving Sonic. https://t.co/uKiY2GLXjf
— Yuji Naka / 中 裕司 (@nakayuji) May 3, 2019
Sega was also unhappy with the design according to producer Tim Miller, several of the creatives who worked on the scenes must feel some degree of justification about getting approval to fix things and for the best.
But is this huge change actually worth all the time and extra money? If the effects animators are required to revise the entire movie in just six months to make its Nov. 8 release date, I have to say it will not be worth all that effort, Even though it’s early in production people is already disappointing on the movie, you can already place bets on the film’s low Rotten Tomatoes score and the likelihood of winning a Razzie award.
It’s required for special effects to be reworked, between a film’s trailer and the final cut of the movie. In the case of Sonic the Hedgehog, It is now just minor tweaks and rendering changes. Sonic will have to get new eyes, new teeth, new hands, and maybe a full render of the character in order to look somewhat acceptable to the fans who are really upset by the creepy unrealistic humanoid hedgehog which they have shown us in the trailers, to be honest, I can’t and don’t want to even look at him, he is creepy and something is very wrong with this character.
If you’re going to radically change the main character’s look to the amount needed, extra time seems like a requirement. To match to another trailer with visuals that edged people out, Alita: Battle Angel got postponed twice after the first trailer’s launch to allow for extra time to finish the film’s effects. The modifications the studio made to Alita’s design were very minor compared to the fixes Sonic needed to be acceptable. Monster Trucks, another live-action/CG movie from Paramount Animation, had to be postponed two years due to the initial design for Creech terrifying test audiences.
As Detective Pikachu director Rob Letterman also pointed out, the task of reanimating CGI parts in a live-action movie is even harder than it would be in a completely animated movie. You have to consider the live actors’ communications with animated characters. The smallest change could toss the whole scene off.
Visual effects professionals are already not paid what they’re worth. Putting these professionals through six months of crisis time, frantically trying to fix the look of the main character as they probably knew was bad in the first place, just feels evil. Just because Sonic the Hedgehog is based on a video game it does not mean that movie has to follow the video game industry’s crazy crunch practices.
Even after all this are you sure you’d really go see the Sonic the Hedgehog movie with a fixed Sonic design? I know I wouldn’t this movie is dead to me now, because all I can see is that creepy face.
Accept the fact that: Sonic the Hedgehog looks like a seriously bad movie for reasons that go past just creepy character design. The cracks in the trailer are silly and cheap. Jim Carrey’s doing the already seen many many times same annoying faces that stopped being funny many many moons ago. Instead of working on some new creative story ideas from the games, cartoons or comics, the basis is a generic fish out of water tale that tells us of those live-action Smurfs movies If not anything else. And why is Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” is in the trailer when there’s nothing remotely gangsta about Sonic the Hedgehog? What was that all about!
To be honest here, with the Uncanny Valley man-hog character design, at least this film might have a possibility of being “so bad it’s good.” Fixing the character might make it easier on the eyes and on the soul, but it can’t make the movie any better that’s likely gonna be mediocre at best. If you want the movie to credible enough that someone can sit through the entirety of the movie and give designers a fair amount of time to work on the character, but still you can’t do anything about Jim Carey and run-of-the-mill story, start betting on Razzie award.
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