Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie

The fastest thing alive isn’t always good. On March 26th, 2022, I watched the 1996 anime movie Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie. Starring Martin Burke, Lainie Frasier, and Bill Wise, it takes place in the Land of the Sky and the Land of Darkness.

Sonic and his best friend Tails reluctantly agree to help Dr. Robotnik stop a generator that will explode and destroy their worlds. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a trick and creates a robot duplicate of Sonic called Metal Sonic. With the help of Knuckles, they have to stop this robot duplicate. Can they stop him? Is this the end of the blue hedgehog?

To wrap up my video game movie month, I thought it was most fitting to do a review on this little known animated Sonic movie, as my next review is on the yet to be released Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Describing my thoughts on this, I would call this movie bad, but I think that would be an understatement. A better term would be an animated abomination! This movie is so completely awful that it baffles me they thought it was a good idea. It’s so bad that the only way to learn of its existence is if you’re a Sonic fan or if you read movie reviews. I have plenty to rant about, so let’s get started.

The characters in this movie are poorly handled. The voice actors sound like they’re speaking into broken recording equipment. As for the characters themselves, that’s not much better. Sonic is very unlikable in this movie, like when he yells at Tails to shut up when he’s screaming for help from danger. Tails never shuts up and Knuckles feels like a last-minute addition to this film. Robotnik is just creepy rather than an intimidating and funny villain like you would expect, and Metal Sonic has no depth to him. This lack of depth takes away from a scene near the end of the movie that we’re supposed to get emotional about. However, due to the scene having absolutely no build up at all and involving Metal Sonic, it just comes across as random and forced. The President is completely useless. A character named Old Man Owl serves little to no purpose and just comes off as pathetic. Sara is the worst character in this movie and hands down, one of the worst Sonic characters ever created. She’s the love interest character to Sonic, but her entire role is either just being a damsel in distress or constantly complaining about something she doesn’t like. With all of these descriptions, a common theme is found. All of these characters are unlikable and one-dimensional characters who never shut up.

The dialogue in this movie is just the worst. You cringe every time a character opens their mouth. The award for the worst line in this movie has to be, “You might know everything I’m going to do, but that’s not going to help you since I know everything you’re going to do! Strange, isn’t it?” I think that line is stranger than anything else. The humor in this movie is no better than the rest of the dialog, since all the jokes completely fall flat. Instead of being funny, they’re mentally painful to hear. But the normal jokes aren’t even as bad as the dirty jokes. They for some reason, decided to throw in as many dirty jokes as they could thinking it would get laughs. I can only guess that this was their attempt to entertain the parents of the children watching. The result was that they make the movie confused as to it being an adult or child movie. In my opinion it is not something you should show your kid. I will spare you the discomfort and not share any of them.

The writing in the movie is just as bad as all the other shortcomings mentioned above. To understand what’s going on, you need to be familiar with the source material, otherwise you could be lost. Even then, some of the new content is hard to understand for fans. Sara and Old Man Owl are new characters we’re supposed to know all about, but because they’re new, they just come off as confusing. Sara looks like a human, but has a cat tail and ears. Is she a human or a cat? I don’t know, because it’s never explained. There’s also the fact that Knuckles suddenly has a hat, which he doesn’t in anything else, and they constantly bring up his treasure hunter status from the games despite him never doing anything treasure hunter related in the movie. Also, his presence in the movie felt more like an attempt to attract his fans given how randomly he’s put in the story. Despite Amy Rose’s presence as a popular main Sonic character, she doesn’t appear here, when she would have filled the love interest role much better than Sara. The plot of this movie doesn’t go anywhere and there’s really no lesson learned. It feels more like an episode of a cartoon show. Even the 5 Sonic cartoons that were made had better plots than this movie.

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself, does this movie have any good qualities? Well, there are some. The animation is really nice looking for one thing, even if I have seen better. The fight scenes in this movie are really cool, especially the final confrontation between Sonic and Metal Sonic. The background music works well and it’s definitely worth listening to. Despite these qualities, it doesn’t make up for just how poorly this movie was made.

Overall, this movie is a major disappointment. It is an absolute chore to watch. It would take several years until 2020 for a good Sonic movie to be released. You can read that review by pressing this link. To wrap up, I wouldn’t wish this movie on my worst enemy. Next time I release a review, it will be of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Let’s hope it’s a great movie and not at all like this one.