Several years ago, I decided to give the Sonic the Hedgehog movie a watch. Released in 2020, the movie had a troubled beginning, but became a wildly successful franchise with 2 sequels and a spinoff series, plus a fourth film scheduled for 2027.
I hated it.
I have enough history with Sonic that something about Sonic’s character, Jim Carey’s performance as villain Dr. Robotnik, and James Marsden’s role as Sonic’s human friend, Tom, all rubbed me the wrong way. So I left the series alone for several years. But, well, they made a third movie, lots of people praised Carey’s performances, and most important my son getting into Sonic and wanting to watch the movies, meant I gave it another shot last week.
And I must have been hangry or something the first time through, because all three of these movies are amazing, deeply moving, and well worth your time -as an adult, as a parent, and even if you don’t have a background with the games.
Growing Up Off Sonic
Let me back up. I was a Nintendo kid growing up. Mario. Donkey Kong. In a sign that I would become a member of the PC Master Race, Turn and Burn: No Fly Zone.1 But I had friends who had the Sega GameGear, through which I learned about Ecco the Dolphin. OK, I also became vaguely familiar with Sonic the Hedgehog, the Fastest Thing Alive. It was, too me, a fairly low skill platformer that emphasized “speed” and simplicity over the difficulty of Mario, and I wasn’t super into it, but it was a game I could play with my friends.
It gave me enough awareness of the character, though, that when the Sonic Cartoon came out in 1993, I wanted to watch it. And it was amazing.2
This was the media that made me actually take Sonic more seriously. In the game, I had a vague idea that the villain -Dr. Robotnik -had turned the animals of the forest into robots, and Sonic had to collect rings for reasons I didn’t really understand and then jump on the robots in order to free the animals. But in the cartoon, Robotnik’s love of robotics has resulted in the complete desolation of the planet Mobius and Sonic and his band of rebels have to fight a guerilla war to free the planet and save the forest. It compared very favorably to, for example, The Adventures of the Gummi Bears. It was the first time Sonic was about something more than “speed” for me.3
Alas, the series ended on a cliffhanger, and I went about the rest of my life, getting more into PC games. But I retained an interest in the series from a distance. Several years ago, Dan from New Frame Plus did a video on the animation of Sonic over time that was very interesting. So, these days I’m playing on the PS5, and a couple months ago I picked up the updated re-release of Sonic Generations, and enjoyed it. I got to see all the new characters I’d missed in the intervening three decades and get maybe a bit better feel for the character I’d not really experienced during that period.
Bringing Sonic to the Big Screen
A Sonic movie had a number of challenges to surmount. First, Sonic has never been easy to animate in 3D, as Dan Floyd ably demonstrates. Second, Sonic games do not, generally, have much of plot. Sonic is not usually about speed, but about improving your performance on the levels. The reason I didn’t like the games very much as a kid is because you can beat most Sonic levels by holding down the right arrow and making sure you have a ring at all times. Finishing the courses is trivial. The art of the game is finishing the courses faster, or collecting special items while completing the courses, or finding new paths through the course. The plot, if it even exists, is a mere justification for stringing these courses together. But at heart, Sonic is a racing game. Third, the plots of the Sonic games are, to be gentle, usually bonkers. And fourth, Sonic’s history of meshing with humans and reality is not great. The characters are cartoons, so any enmeshing with humanity is immediately a variant of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Which I guess explains the bonkers plots.
And why the original design for Sonic was poorly received.
And, in addition to being hangry, I think the natural absurdity of a speedy alien hedgehog with an enormous head might also have been a little off-putting.
But, the filmmakers made several really good decisions to bring Sonic to the Silver Screen. First, they drastically simplified the story down to just Sonic, Robotnik, and the humans caught in the middle. Second, they did embrace the Roger Rabbitiness of the entire concept. And third, they leaned hard into theme rather than plot.
All three Sonic movies have overarching themes that are variation on “mad scientist Robotnik wants to take over the world; Sonic and friends stop him.” But that isn’t what any of the movies are about. Instead, the movies take an idea, and then throw an animated alien hedgehog into it and let him bounce around a bit just to see what happens, and the amazing thing is that it works. Like all the best art, the end result of these movies is greater than the raw ingredients. The absurdity also lets them get laughs out of depicting realistic situations as they collide with the crazy.
Friendship
The first movie chose the theme of Friendship, and I don’t know how I missed it so hard the first time around. The movie begins with Sonic’s guardian being killed and sending Sonic through a ring portal to earth at the age of 5. For the next 10 years, Sonic lives in hiding near the town of Green Hills, Montana.4 Only one person in the town ever knows Sonic is there, and he’s treated as crazy for his beliefs in the Blue Devil, but Sonic “makes” some friends from afar. He sneaks into the garden of Tom and Maddie (James Marsden and Tika Sumpter) to watch their lives, watch movies over their shoulder5 and pretend he’s part of the community, but in reality he lives alone in a cave. That reality is brought home after watching a little league baseball game and seeing the crowd cheer -but when he plays baseball with himself (something he can do because of his speed), he can’t run the bases and cheer, and the crushing reality of his loneliness activates a latent power which blacks out the United States.
In response, the United States sends Dr. Ivo Robotnik (Jim Carey) and his egg droids to investigate. The polar opposite of Sonic, Robotnik has agents and subordinates galore, and he despises all of them. He is the smartest man in the world, and no one compares to him, and he hates being surrounded by morons. Sonic tries to use his rings to go on the lam, but one thing leads to another and he accidentally drops his stash of rings into a portal that lands in San Francisco, get’s tranquilizered by Tom, and barely escapes being shot by the egg droids. And, feeling somewhat guilty about the whole thing, Tom decides to go on a road trip with Sonic to retrieve the rings.
During the road trip, alien and human discuss their dreams, what they really want out of life, and the very concept of a bucket list; while pursued by Robotnik, who is slowly going insane that, for all his brilliance, he is being thwarted by a little blue hedgehog. The core of the movie, though, is when Tom reveals to Sonic that he doesn’t feel needed in Green Hills. That he wants to be an SF Police Officer because in San Francisco he could save lives. Sonic, who has spent his whole life wanting what Tom has -family and friends who rely on him for even mundane things, can’t comprehend that Tom isn’t happy in Green Hills. In contrast, Robotnik loses more and more contact with the rest of his team -until only Agent Stone (Lee Majdoub) remains to assist him, and even Stone gets left by the wayside in San Francisco -and despite becoming happier and happier for the distance he gets away from the morons of the world, he slowly becomes more and more unhinged.
The three worlds of Friendship - Tom’s desire for more than friends, Sonic’s desire to have friends, and Robotnik’s desire to be free of human annoyance - come together atop the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. And by the magic of portals, ends on Main Street back in Green Hills. Tom gets his chance to save Sonic, and in doing so all his friends in the community come out to help him, and Tom realizes that he wasn’t just the sheriff doing things for people. The people really were his friends, and they really had his back. When Tom says that Sonic is his friend, Sonic is able to control his own powers and activate them at will to fight back against Robotnik. And in an amusing irony, Robotnik gets sent through a portal to be the only person to live on the Mushroom planet. At last, he is free of human annoyances. And he finds that he misses them. He even makes a mockup of Agent Stone to keep him company.
Heroism
The second movie tackles heroism. What makes a hero? Why does maturity matter? How do the mantles of heroism get passed from older generations to the current generation? And to contrast Sonic’s reckless desire to be a hero, the movie introduces Tails (a two-tailed fox) and Knuckles the Echidna (voiced by Idris Elba, and so well I wasn’t sure it was him until I checked the cast list). Tails thinks he’s too small and cowardly to be a hero. Knuckles comes from a warrior tribe that has been wiped out and defines his heroism exclusively in terms of regaining his tribe’s honor by completing their quest for the Chaos Emeralds. All of them contrast with Robotnik’s self-centered quest for personal glory and power.
Tom and Maddie have a subplot involving going to Maddie’s sister’s wedding to Randall Handel (Shemar Moore), who turns out to be an undercover agent trying to find Sonic, and while this is, plot-wise, largely disconnected from the Sonic and Knuckles plot, it is thematically attached to the question of what makes a hero. When the government captures Sonic and Tom, Maddie drops everything to rescue them. Randall talks about how his own heroism is tied to his friendship with his team -and that having fallen in love with Maddie’s sister, he can’t break up her team (that is, Sonic) and lets them go. And Sonic and Tails discover their ability to be heroes comes from forming a team and protecting each other, and then to saving Knuckles, who also joins their team. Mature heroism for Team Sonic isn’t about dashing deeds or questing for glory and recognition, it’s about doing your part in a team of friends to protect each other.
And whether it’s an intentional parallel or not, I could not say, but bringing together the Chaos Emeralds is what allows Sonic to go Super Sonic and defeat Robotnik, which again emphasizes the idea of heroism as working within a team.
The heroism of Sonic isn’t Homeric Epic personal glory, it’s Roman and Medieval standing your ground and protecting your friend with your shield against the charging chaos. Robotnik continues to have the support of Agent Stone, but when Robotnik gets full power he starts using his power alone and it is his ego and demand for the glory of defeating Sonic solo that allows the heroes of Team Sonic to defeat him.
Love
The third movie is, thematically, the most complex and also the best movie of the present trilogy. As in the prior movies, the film uses Sonic as a mirror to Robotnik -who despite growing up an orphan discovers his grandfather is still alive. But also to newly introduced Shadow (voiced by Keanu Reeves, which I just love given how much Reeves’s other characters have been involved in the prior movies). The movie is a little on the spot here with Tom explicitly saying that Sonic has grown into a good young man/hedgehog-alien because he has not let the bad things and the losses of his life change him. Unsaid, but heavily implied, is that Tom and Maddie acting as his surrogate parents is also a big part of that. He’s learned love from Tom and Maddie6 and that allowed him to become friends with Knuckles, despite Knuckles’ tribe being the ones who killed Sonic’s guardian in the first film.
By contrast, Gerald Robotnik neglected Ivo and only loved Ivo’s cousin, Maria. Maria befriended Shadow 50 years earlier and was Shadow the Hedgehog’s connection to humanity. Alas, when the human governments tried to take Shadow for their own research, Maria was killed in the crossfire. Shadow and Gerald were locked away in suspended animation.7 In the present, both escaped from their confinement, the pain of losing Maria has led them both to a plan to seize an orbital cannon and use it to destroy the earth and then kill themselves. With Maria dead, they have nothing to live for, and if they have nothing to live for, then no one else can live either.
During the course of the movie, Shadow nearly kills Tom, which leads Sonic to get the Chaos Emeralds so that he can go Super Sonic on Shadow in revenge. To do so he has to get the emeralds from Knuckles, who tells Sonic that in his current state, Sonic is in no condition to make decisions about the power of the emeralds.8 Sonic ignores Knuckles, goes Super Sonic, and goes to fight Shadow in an earth-to-the-moon and back brawl, where Shadow gets his own hands on the Chaos Emeralds and goes Super Shadow.
But what makes this such a great scene is that, at the end, Sonic beats Shadow on the moon -but rather than killing him, he releases his powers and simply sits next to Shadow. Shadow looks up at the stars and remembers the last time Maria took him to look at the stars, and told him that they were so far away that some of the stars they were looking at might not even be there anymore, but their light was still coming to the earth. For the first time he opens up to someone else, and asks Sonic about the experience of loss.
And Sonic tells him that the feeling of loss never goes away, but the feeling of love also stays. And Shadow repeats Maria’s line: that the light shines, even though the star is gone. And his eyes are opened.
I’ve mentioned before that my base theory of art is that it is the transfiguration of material. What is said and what is shown is not what the art is about; and this scene exemplifies that. Analyzing somewhat kills the moment, which is why I put the video above this section. But this is the microcosm of what the Sonic movies do so well. Sonic isn’t a road trip movie, that’s just the genre. Sonic 2 isn’t a superhero movie, that’s just the scenery. And here, sitting on the moon, Shadow is realizing that his loss and his love are not opposites, and the memory that has been nothing but pain for him for 50 years is now a salve -and we watch that transformation in real time.9
And this isn’t even the climax of the movie! That comes several minutes later when Ivo learns that Gerald is planning to destroy the world, and Ivo objects because his friend Stone is on earth. Ivo Robotnik speedruns the prior three movies in about 15 minutes, realizing the importance of friendship, discovering what it means to be a hero, and the healing power of love -which Jim Carey displays in the greatest demonstration of scene-chewing hammery since William Shatner hosted the Miss United States Pageant.10
The Virtuous Cycle
Watching the three movies in relatively short succession reveals many interconnections between them. From Robotnik’s sacrifice to Sonic’s forgiveness, the movies are not a collection of callbacks and game references -that’s only the surface. Rather, these are movies about a 15 year old becoming a responsible adult, about adults dealing responsibly with situations they have no reason to have ever prepared for, and even villains realizing the self-destruction of their own ways.
Dressed up as a family movie for your kids.
It’s a movie series about virtue, about bravery and wisdom and moderation and justice. About revenge and anger and recklessness. There is a surprising amount to think and feel about a little blue hedgehog with running shoes and attitude.
I’m glad I gave them another try.
The Super Nintendo had bumpers on the controller, and if you pressed them, you got to see your pilot actually turn his head to look to the left or right for enemy fighters chasing you, and this was amazing in 1993.
So, it was actually 2 different cartoons, both voiced by Jaleel White (Steve Urkel from Family Matters), but I was too young to figure that out, and I just thought the quality of the cartoon was extremely variable. Which wasn’t actually uncommon in those days. Doug Walker had an amusing -but sufficiently blue that I’m just going to link it -sketch contrasting the two simultaneous shows.
Way back in the day, Errant Signal had a video on Sonic arguing that the game wasn’t really about speed, but about controlling speed and motion. Though I actually rather like the cast of characters that joined Sonic, and I like Sonic’s interactions with the other Mobites.
One of the neat things that the movie does, which did improve my appreciation for it, once I caught them, is that there are a lot of little references like this throughout the movie. Green Hills is the starter level in the Sonic games. The climax of the movie takes place in San Francisco, which is the Sonic level “Escape the City.”
His favorite movies are Keanu Reeves movies -Speed and Point Break, and I think Bill and Ted gets mentioned, too.
Also, I just love that Tom and Maddie are portrayed as a thoroughly function married couple. I intensely dislike all of the jokes from Maddie’s sister about how she should divorce Tom in the first film, and I’m glad they were largely dropped in the subsequent films. And I would have liked to see Randall and her in the third film being normal, happy people rather than the brief cameo we get.
Technically, it’s implied Gerald has been using Shadow’s Chaos Energy to stay alive to 110 years old.
And also, I really love the fact that Sonic and Knuckles’ relationship is treated like a real, functional friendship. And with Tails. Knuckles bluntly tells Sonic that Sonic is breaking his promise and is not acting as himself, but when Sonic will not calm down, Knuckles relents because part of being a friend is trusting each other. Sonic is Knuckles’ friend, Knuckles has told Sonic what he thinks, but he will let Sonic do what he wants to do and won’t fight him over it.
And Keanu Reeves absolutely sells the transformation. The idea that Reeves is a bad actor is deeply unfounded. I would allow that he may have a narrow niche, that doesn’t include traditional leading man roles, but he absolutely nails the emotions of his scenes in his movies.
I lacked a good place to discuss it in text, but the extremely memeable scene of Gerald and Ivo dancing across the laser grid is also, in context, a hilarious subversion of the usual spy tropes. Their suits make them immune to the lasers, so the dancing isn’t to avoid the lasers, they are dancing because it literally doesn’t matter how they cross the room -and everything about it is absurd and hilarious.