It’ll be no secret to anyone at this point that Paramount’s first trailer for the live-action Sonic The Hedgehog movie went down about as well as a turd in a tent among fans of the blue blur.
Pretty much all criticisms were leveled squarely at the design of Sonic himself, which to be fair did look like a some kind of terrifying demon that collects human teeth more than it looked like a loveable cartoon hedgehog.
Following a pretty intense internet backlash, which mostly consisted of memes and the occasional fan redesign, the movie’s director Jeff Fowler confirmed that Sonic would be redesigned. The movie was recently pushed back to 2020 from its November 2019 release date as a result of this new work.
While I previously argued that Sonic’s hasty redesign doesn’t bode well for the overall quality of the film – mostly because this whole mess implies to me that the way Sonic actually looks is probably the least of the project’s problems – I can now confirm that putting a more classic design of the hedgehog in the trailer actually makes a massive difference.
Obviously I still have no idea if watching a more cartoony Sonic in the final film will be the thing that saves it, but this astounding effort from animator and artist Artur Baranov on YouTube makes that first trailer so much easier to stomach – mostly because I’m not retching at the sight of Sonic’s weird human fingers.
The recut trailer is literally the exact one we got – right down to Gangta’s Paradise. The only difference is a Sonic that looks like Sonic, and not some garbled nightmare version of the hedgehog. I honestly can’t get over how much better this makes the film look, so check it out for yourself below.
While it’s not always quite perfect, the quality of Artur’s effort is undeniable. Even seeing an occasionally dodgy looking Sonic that actually looks the part is miles better than being subjected to an expertly rendered lanky Sonic with muscular legs.
While we still don’t know what direction Paramount will ultimately go in with the official redesign, I can’t imagine for a second that the studio won’t adopt the classic, cartoony look we see above.
Then again, Paramount let the initial design get to the point it did, so I have no idea what it’s going to do next to screw Sonic The Hedgehog up. I’m almost excited to find out.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.