No one can deny the existence of fur on Sonic. It's there in plain SEGA blue. If you pull Sonic from out of your CGI'd polygonal Sonic games and examine him, he's not going to feel like he has blue and peach humanesque skin. He's likely have the smooth and softness of a real African Pygmy hedgehog (the spines are debatable as they're meant to annihilate robots). How Sonic's appearance will look like in an actual real life setting, not simply a realistic yet still fantasical setting of Sonic '06, is subject to interpretation debates. Gotta love these debates!
Sleeking back the fur is definitely an option. Personally I like to view this shaggy scruffy Sonic as a Sonic before he broke the sound barrier, before he spent 20 years chasing after Robotnik to stop his vile schemes. There have been quite a few ideas and examples of how Sonic would look younger. We seen him with brown fur, gap between his eye teeth, or totally different shoes. We haven't really seen a SEGA Sonic game take on a younger Sonic before he became the true blue hero.
This may be a fan's interpretation of him rather than from an officially licensed media's interpretation, but when you think about it, there's really no strict “wrong” way to show off how Sonic looks, especially when judging them within their own continuity. Brown Sonic makes perfect sense to the readers of the Fleetway Sonic comics because of the way of how the story is written and executed. If a completely brown Sonic whose quills look NOTHING like Sonic at all can make sense to a group of readers, then it's very possible that a scruffy Sonic in this film can make sense to its watchers. I'm well aware that people may not like brown or the scruffy Sonic, but we all know very well by now that you can never please everyone.
I think we shouldn't be concentrating on who Sonic
is, but who Sonic
can be.
Also think about how Sonic would have looked like if we just rip his in-game model and put it into the real world:
We all know and well Rocky does not have visible fur in the classic cartoons. Let's stay true to the character designs and put him in a real life environment as he is!
On the other hand:
We know in our minds that Yogi is not drawn with fur in his classic cartoons either. Look how much better he assimilates into his real life surroundings.
I'm not out here to say that any of your preferences for a furless Sonic is wrong. The idea of Sonic with dog fur is downright appalling to some people because it was never explicitly highlighted in the games (besides the Werehog use). However I know we haven't seen Sonic interacting in a real, nonCGI'd environment in the games (usually reserved for cereal and pasta commercials). Sometimes we forget this fact and unconsciously assume that if a CGI'd lack of fur Sonic looks sweet against the purely CGI'd environment of Sweet Mountain, there shouldn't be a problem if that CGI'd environment is swapped out for the Himalayas.
I also started a poll on my deviantART page to gather a good amount of feedback on it. Right now it's overwhelmingly in favor of the fur with quills look
. I thought it was her that said it. Maybe she said it in IRC...I don't know. But her basic point was that since this film is a mix of CGI and real life, Sonic needed to have the real fur and quills to blend in to the world around him. I think it makes perfect sense. But it's not my thoughts that I want to know (I already know them), it's your thoughts I'm interested in. So let's hear it...what do you think?
