Two live-action movies of beloved Nintendo franchises are hitting the big screens soon. But their receptions are extremely different—especially when it comes to the visual adaptation of everyone’s favorite characters to a cinematic universe. Fans have been so vehemently and vocally repulsed by Sonic’s live action design that the director for the live-action Sonic movie has promised to redesign Sonic before the full movie arrives in theatres…but everyone loves the cute and realistic designs of Pokémon in Detective Pikachu.
When it comes to unrealistic, cartoonish character designs and how they’re brought to VFX-life, what did Sonic do wrong that Detective Pikachu did right?
In short, the answer lies in how much the moviemakers decided to stay loyal to the original designs. It seems like a simple answer, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Both the Sonic and Pokémon franchises have cartoony, over-the-top, imaginative designs for their characters. Sonic himself is an unrealistically-proportioned, bright blue “hedgehog” with human-skin-colored belly and limbs: Sonic the Hedgehog. Pikachu, and other Pokémon, appear as wildly fantastic reinterpretations of Earth animals; Pikachu is a large, yellow-and-brown “mouse” with electric powers and plenty of cute to go around: Pikachu. Most importantly, both Sonic and Pikachu’s character designs—along with their in-game cohort—are based on real-life animals.
This is important because Sonic’s designers and Detective Pikachu’s designers took different paths after acknowledging that fact.
Sonic’s original design has its strengths in his big eyes, large head (especially the spikes on the back of his head), and sizeable extremities, even if the rest of him is small, thin, or otherwise unrealistic in being an actual hedgehog’s body. Where the Sonic live-action movie turns horrifying is in Sonic’s completely revamped features. Presumably, it is some desperate attempt to make him more realistic than he was ever intended to be, and the results have not favored the live-action movie.
The live-action Sonic has tiny eyes, a properly, proportionally-sized body, and small head spikes. He has the appearance of not quite a hedgehog—because he’s standing on two feet and human-kid-sized—but he also has a long way to go before being Sonic. The result is a hybrid that looks a tad horrifying, as live-action Sonic has none of the trademark Sonic traits, yet he’s not completely a hedgehog. It was so ugly that, after the trailer was released and the horrified reactions came flooding in, the director eventually had to release a statement that they would redesign Sonic entirely.
In Detective Pikachu’s case, the unrealistic traits of every Pokémon design were capitalized upon by designers. Instead of making Pikachu a compromise between a real mouse and the original Pikachu’s design, renders had Pikachu looking like a fluffy, real-life version of the original look for Pikachu—despite the fact that those proportions could never exist in any actual mouse. This resulted in some very ridiculous, fun looks for certain Pokémon, such as Ludicolo or and Psyduck, but these looks were never disloyal. Big, weird eyes? Huge duck bills and mouths? Who cares, so long as it still looks like the actual Pokémon? The characters on-screen genuinely look like live-action replicas of the cartoon or game designs themselves, and it’s worked in Detective Pikachu’s favor. After all, how can you say no to a creature as cute as Pikachu?
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