Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) movie

After watching the movie again I hope they revisit some of the problems I saw with the way Sonic gets portrayed.

The CGI compositing of the movie could have been a bit more tight. There's a lot of scenes where Sonic and the drones (and other elements) really feel like they're not there and you can see the black outlines around them.

The other thing that doesn't help is that there are moments where Sonic doesn't affect the environment. For example, there's a scene where Sonic runs fast to pick up something off the floor and there's debris around him but nothing moves. Again, there's a lot of scenes like this where either stuff doesn't move or if it does it's like if Sonic was running at 6mph instead of the speed of sound.

The last two are his proportions and scaling. Sometimes he looks and moves like his game model, but sometimes his "realistic" anatomy pops up and I feel like that clashes.

I guess a better way to explain it is that he looks like Sonic one minute and the next he looks like a toddler wearing Sonic's head. I could never really gauge his size since sometimes he's sitting or standing in a scene and he looks a certain size, and after cutting back to him he's either taller or smaller during the same scene. This is more noticeable during the truck scenes and when he's in a house (during various parts of the movie.)

Now, I know that most of these problems are because of budget and time. I don't want to make it seem like I'm blaming the talented people that worked on the movie, but I really, really hope that Paramount puts more time and resources for the sequel.

(And I really hope there is one.)

 

I thought something looked off too, and to me, I think it's that the hands look too small. Even with the thumb curled in, Sonic's hands are absolutely massive compared to the cuffs on his gloves.

 

That’s true. How come? It’s quite possible they had to resize his proportions so that they match Jim Carrey as the villain. Makes sense to me. Wouldn’t it be alienating to see a cartoon protagonist that has almost no human traits in his design beating up human actors?? That’s why I say (or said) gloves = too big

 

I'm fine-combing the movie for references and stuff (there's a few scene continuity errors between jump cuts, rule setting then breaking, and at least one voice overlay I spotted that doesn't match the mouth, all indicative of the extensive rework job) and found this fun bit I surprisingly didn't find in this thread;



From the Robotnik music scene.

Here's some examples of scene continuity stuff I've found so far (Not going to go through all of them unless it's wanted I guess, just showing two decent examples);

Spoiler

No socks?

frame forward

Socks!


:D

frame forward

Side note, I find it very neat that they eased you in to Sonic making nicknames for things (Donut Lord, Pretzel Lady) in order to start calling Robotnik by Eggman. It's the SA1 method :P

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There was a sponsored watch party on Twitter today and a ton of neat things were shared;
https://twitter.com/tyson_hesse/status/1246227402704863232?s=20 (Note the specific white lines at the top-center)
https://twitter.com/tyson_hesse/status/1246234997775683584?s=20 (Post credits implementation clarification)
https://twitter.com/rejectedjokes/status/1246210935275974656?s=20 (Entire thread is good stuff)
https://twitter.com/Pat_Kc/with_replies (No single thread, just various tweets of fun bits including a plot hole cover-up assist by Tyson)
https://twitter.com/fowltown/with_replies (Also no single thread, just bits n' pieces. Use the hashtag.)

 

Is there any word of a special edition release?

 

https://twitter.com/tyson_hesse/status/1246229216665800709
Wait... Did Hesse just confirm here that it's really Pachacamac here and not just a easter egg?

 

I finally took the time to watch this movie again, in English this time, and I did find a continuity error, too. I'm not going to put it in spoilers since it's pretty simple, also the movie has been out for months now.

At 44:38, Sonic strikes out "do a slam dunk" from his bucket list, and you can see "tame a wild animal" already striked out as well, two lines above.

However, at 45:04, that's when he's seen striking out "tame a wild animal", while "do a slam dunk" is not striked out yet, two lines below.

They probably meant to play those two scenes in the other order initially and they forgot to update the bucket list close ups.

(the score and the high score also are inconsistent in the aforementioned slam dunk scene, but for all we know it's possible that they started a new game, so eh)

 

Fowler: Sonic Movie Sequel Not In The Works, Would Love To Do More

 

They're probably just keeping stuff under wraps for now. I remember some of the cast members said they'd signed on for sequels, and the writers revealed they didn't include Tails, the Chaos Emeralds, etc. specifically to set up sequels. It's not unheard of for filmmakers to deny a sequel is in the works when it really is (e.g. Ewan McGregor denied the Obi-Wan series was a thing for years before he came out and said he'd been lying).

 

I mean, COVID-19 is probably also throwing everything for a loop right now.

 

I think that post-credits scenes are such a standard in movies now that they're always included if there's any hope of the film getting a sequel/franchise. People go gaga for post-credits scenes and sequel hooks to the extent that it would just be silly not to include one. It wasn't always clear if this film would be a success or not, especially after they were forced to redesign the main character and delay the film as a result of such negative reception, so to hear that a sequel wasn't officially green-lit so soon is no surprise.

 

The original version of Speed Me Up leaked because it was on the French version of the movie. It's uh...pretty bad. But still cool that it's here.

 

Saw the first 8 minutes that Fandango has on youtube. Found it super "in your face" and annoying in a Deadpool/Detective Pikachu kind of way.

I'm more of a classic gamer and never really followed the overarching "story" of Sonic games.

From that clip alone I don't see myself ever watching this.

 

Bump for the physical release coming out, at least in the US. Picked it up at Walmart a little while ago, probably gonna watch with the family tonight. I enjoyed it when it came out, so I'm excited to watch it again.

 

Artist Douglas Olsen released a set of full scene storyboards for the movie. You can download them here: https://dougolsen.com/storyboards-feature

They get pretty... interesting.

 

That's in line with the art he posted back in 2018

 

Bumping this because some cinemas finally resumed activity after these months of coronavirus confinement and they're still having this movie on their program, I could go see it again. I won't though, I've already bought it on DVD; not many extras in this version, but some are quite interesting. Btw, it contains some deleted scenes with a low quality model of Sonic the abomination, but no trace of the more developed model from the trailers.

 

For July 4th some digital storefronts changed the cover art of the movie to be an American variant of sorts. It's just a quick photoshop job but interesting enough to note. So far I've only seen it on the Redbox website so not sure where else it is being used.