View attachment 196153
The difference between the Sonic movie and Detective Pikachu is that the latter is unashamed of sticking to what makes their respective characters beloved. If this design of Pikachu was a silhouette, you would still recognize it as Pikachu. And this isn't even with just Pikachu, ALL of the Pokemon in the movie have the same structure as their game counterparts, just with little touches that make them fit in the world. Lickitung looks like Lickitung, Greninja looks like Greninja, and Charizard looks like Charizard. The Pokemon Company knows how well beloved and recognizable these designs are, and as such made the film makers keep their beloved looks, and as we've seen so far, it works.
Meanwhile, if we were to put this Sonic in silhouette, he would still have some basic concepts of Sonic's game design, but the body structure is completely different, it looks like a human wearing a Sonic mascot suit. Sonic's character design is incredibly iconic and beloved, any change is going to cause a reaction, but at least something like Boom Sonic still looks like Sonic. Movie Sonic here drastically changes Sonic's design like we've never seen before. Some elements of the original design are there, but I have more of a hard time buying Movie Sonic as Sonic than I do buying Movie Pikachu as Pikachu.
And even then, if you can't take Game Sonic and give him realistic textures, they can still do a much better job than what has been shown here. This touch up of the design is by
InnSomnio1 on Twitter.
It's not exactly Game Sonic, but doesn't it look so much better? Doesn't it look more in-line with what one would expect Sonic to look like? It's a design change I'm sure many would be on board with it.
And I'm not exactly okay with the design being just "mediocre", I expected it to look a lot worse, but that doesn't necessarily mean what we have now is good. For Sonic's first and maybe even only theatrical film, people don't want him to look bad or mediocre, they want him to look good or even great. People may complain not matter what, even Detective Pikachu faced very minor backlash, but it didn't take long for people to come around it. Even if Detective Pikachu ends up being bad, I can at least appreciate the artistic care put into it to make the Pokemon and the world surrounding them true to the source material. Next to nothing about the Sonic movie from what we have heard sounds anything like a Sonic movie, and if they can't nail the titular character, that gives people little faith in what the film has to offer.