I started gaming in the PS1 days, not long after Sega decided to cannibalize itself out of the
console market with two competing 32-bit hardware SKUs, and I was not blessed with older gamer
siblings or techy parents. So outside of a Genesis setup at the dentist’s office, I wasn’t really…
exposed to Sonic the Hedgehog, gaming icon, until he went third party.
I knew about him, of course. It was literally impossible not to as a millennial child with a
Televison, but to me, sonic was just a character in cartoons, coloring books, and surprisingly
great archie comics until Sonic Adventure 2 Battle came along. I loved that game, and Adventure DX
not long after it! but… I probably don’t have to tell you how those have aged, or what quality
of games followed them… somewhere between the hedgehog-human makeout sesh and unleashing of
the Were-hog, I… moved on for my own sanity. That took seven years, though. Almost half
my life, at that point in my life, spent liking, or very badly wanting to like,
a video game franchise without a single good new video game in it – at least, not on home
consoles. And that speaks to the RAW POWER that Sonic possesses as an idea. An… aesthetic.
I’m hardly the only one who’s felt it. Sonic’s huge, hardcore fan following
combines the Chuuni enthusiasm (and overt horniness) of shounen anime stans with the
deep-rooted nostalgic obsession (and repressed horniness) of Disney people. It’s horrifying,
but also remarkable I can’t think of any other series this uneven and mismanaged that’s managed
to inspire such long-term devotion or such a massive volume of fan art, fan fiction,
fan games, original characters, and *#%~@$%!* It’s not just the marketing blitz behind it.
If it were, we’d be seeing existentially nightmarish Super Eyepatch Wolf videos about the
Animorphs fandom… No, on a truly primal level, something about
Sonic resonates with people. Kids especially. The other night, while listening to my good friend
Dan Floyd’s efforts to validate the half year of his life he spent staring at dumb running sonics,
I had an epiphany as to what that something is. And more importantly, how the inspired
GENIUS of Sonic’s character design has directly resulted in the fandom
we know and fear today. But before we get into that…
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To properly understand the genius of Sonic’s character design, one must first have a firm
grasp on the aesthetic evolution of anime, and its roots in the golden age of American animation.
Specifically, what Walt Disney was doing with both comedic short films
and feature length narratives like Snow White. Luckily the last one’s fairly self-explanatory.
Even today, it’s not hard to see how the face-shapes of proto-disney princesses shaped
the faces of early human anime characters, or how in recent years there’s been something of
a feedback loop between the Disney princess marketing line and anime’s moe movement.
As for how the simpler, Cartoonier end of the Disney house style fits into the bigger picture
of anime, I could spend thousands of words detailing the evolution of Osamu Tezuka’s
art and the way other artists were inspired by him, with a lengthy aside about Lilo and Stich’s
surprising and enduring success in Japan, and a bunch of other stuff. Or I could show
you this one picture of Mickey Mouse, Astro Boy, and Goku that sums it all up perfectly.
Goku is modern anime’s Mickey Mouse, and as was the case with Mickey Mouse,
Goku’s creator – and later the massive corporation that owns and endlessly exploits his IP – would go
on to surround that illustrated icon with dozens upon dozens of complimentary character designs.
While many of those characters are now icons in their own right, fashion icons,
even,the most iconic and enduring of them all is, of course, Vegeta, who set the standard for
the shounen rival as a cooler, snarkier, edgily darkier counterpart to the excitable doofus hero,
with even spikier, more aerodynamic hair. A template that has proven with time to be
just as viable as a hero by itself, if you sand down the edges just a bit, and has thus
been iterated upon by shounen artists inspired by Toriyama almost as much as Goku himself.
The true genius of Sonic The Hedgehog is that he represents, essentially, a re-mickey mousification
of the Vegeta template. A slicker, faster, cooler, bluer, more 90s-optimized iteration
every bit as iconic, powerful and potentially merchandisable as the genuine article.
So, why would one want to make Vegeta a Mickey Mouse? LOADS OF REASONS.
For what Sega was attempting, the impromptu central park survey group that helped Oshimoto
settle on this design could not have picked a more perfect candidate. Mario is Video Games’
Mickey Mouse, and as villains go… he’s mostly just got a bunch of big, fat, uncool Pete the
Cats. So the field was wide open for a cooler, more iconic Mario Rival to enter the picture,
and a company looking to compete with the biggest name in gaming couldn’t ask for a
better anti-Mario mascot than Vegeta Mickey Mouse. Sonic had a face you could slap on anything you
wanted to sell, a face that you remembered after seeing it just once. And most importantly, a face
that possessed those qualities while standing apart from every other monolithic pop cultural
entity that already possessed them, allowing his image to endure in popular culture basically
no matter how badly Sega screwed his games and supplementary media up. Which was, at many points,
about as badly as they conceivably could have. The design also, of course, lends itself handily
to both slick sprite animations and syndicated Saturday-morning cartooning. So well that sonic
had two cartoons on air simultaneously in 1993, one with an anarchic looney tunes vibe,
the other – which would form the basis for those great archie comics I mentioned – following in the
footstep’s of the era’s action cartoons, with a dark story of woodland freedom fighters opposing
industrial oppression not-entirely-complimented by a chunky style that was a lot closer to
duck tales than, say, gargoyles. Sonic’s never tried to hide his Anime roots.
I mean, those blue roots turned glowing gold for the first time in Sonic 2, just one year after the
Super Saiyan concept was first introduced in DBZ. But throughout his 16 and 32-bit supersonic run,
his cartoon influences simply shone a lot brighter. Sonic was aiming to capture the
American market, after all, and American kids simply didn’t like anime. Until, all of a sudden
in the mid-to-late 90s, they did, A WHOLE LOT. Sonic the Hedgehog, the fastest trend-chaser
alive, was not far behind, launching a striking new anime’d up art style,
inside a striking new 3D platformer, alongside a striking new game console, with Sonic Adventure
for the Sega Dreamcast on December 23rd 1998. And with this slight shift in design priorities,
and a slate of small but smart style tweaks in 2001’s Sonic Adventure 2, the franchise’s
fan-fueled undeath was eternally guaranteed. Mickey Mouses (originally Oswald the Lucky
Rabbitses) are precision-designed to be as visually appealing and versatile in motion
as possible while still being easy to draw. Noodly arms with big, chunky hands and feet
to accentuate movement stuck on a cute little bean body with bright shorts to help define
the midsection through contrast, and topped with a big, pale massive-eyed monoface that
defines the head in the same way while allowing for a wide range of expression.
And of course, the head behind that face is itself defined by a few simple, iconic shapes.
The addition of color and innovation of cartoon glove hands has complicated these
design principals over the years, but only slightly. The fundamentals remain the same.
If you can draw three overlapping black circles of roughly the right size and spacing, you too
can make a recognizable mickey mouse. Slap three quarter circles on the side of a bigger circle,
and you got a sonic the hedgehog. And the body underneath isn’t that much harder to replicate.
All of this is exactly what you want in a character who needs to be drawn and redrawn
by a factory floor full of artists about seven hundred times per minute he’s on screen. It also,
conveniently, means the character is incredibly easy for even the most untalented aspiring artist,
or just… fan to reproduce and iterate upon in the margins of their notebooks,
their own sketchpad… whatever’s handy, really. If you can get people making fan art of your
characters, they will develop a much deeper attachment to them than they would from simply
buying merch or consuming content – Sanrio, the Pokemon Company, and of course
Disney itself have all leveraged this principal to unfathomable profit over the years. Sonic,
too, got a lot of mileage out of it. He graced the face of a lot of trapper keepers.
But despite being the COOL cartoon mascot, classic sonic was still cute, goofy, and cartoony,
not necessarily emulatable in his coolness. You wanna collect Pikachus, hello kitties,
and mickey mouses, not BE them. Anime, conversely is very good at creating cool
scenarios that we want to project ourselves into – power systems that encourage us to imagine our own
unique abilities, physical actions that are fun to mime out… if you’ve ever done a Naruto run or
practiced your Kamehameha, you know exactly what I’m talking about. But the coolness of a vegeta
is a lot harder to faithfully reproduce, as an artist, than the cuteness of a Mickey Mouse.
I myself am a writer today primarily because I could never get my stupid spindly fingers and
shaky, inflexible wrist to accurately reproduce Yugi Moto’s hair spikes.
Sonic’s redesigned art-style, with its lankierr noodles,
shinier eyes, and spikier spikes – despite being, as dan explained in exhausting detail,
kinda crap for 3D animation – manages to capture the coolness of anime without sacrificing the
artistic accessibility of his mickey mouse origins. So long as you’re decently confident
with drawing basic shapes, you can get like, 90% of the way to an authentic-feeling sonic adventure
2 promo illustration with a bit of effort, maybe struggling a bit with the shading and the shoes.
and even if you just trace, it’s not hard to grasp the essentials and make alterations to
a character that feel stylistically cohesive Which was GAME CHANGING! because by reverse
engineering Vegeta into a mickey mouse, Naoto Oshima inadvertently cracked the
code for converting ANY anime archetype into a marketable-looking cartoon mascot.
Be they a Rock Lee mickey mouse, A Sakura mickey mouse, or A Naruto mickey mouse
Seriously, orange fox, multiple tails. Ignored by the violent pink girl who only likes his cooler,
bluer, spikier friend… I’m onto you, Kishimoto. You and your “original characters.”
But we needn’t limit ourselves to popular shounen stuff. These design conversion metrics
work just as well with a Grandia Feena Mickey Mouse or Darkstalkers Morrigan Mickey Mouse.
Hell, Shadow the Hedgehog is just a Double Vegeta Mickey Mouse, a concept a little too
excessive to work in actual anime, but just the right level of too much to be taken way
too seriously in this “cartoony but cool” world. saying sayonara to him WILL fill you with sadness.
Once you have a setting that can accept something like Shadow the Edge-hog – especially one with
several aesthetically contradicting lines of continuity born from different comic artists
and animation studios putting their own spindash on the material – the sky is basically the limit
for fans to bring their own ideas, or sonic-ified versions of their favourite anime and video games’
ideas, into that world. By the time Sonic Riders arrived with the Babylon Rogues,
it was already impossible to distinguish new official characters from high-end fan creations.
Eventually, the fans would get better at this than sonic team themselves.
By taking Sonic’s style into the simple and clean end of the “Kingdom hearts zone”
of the anime-cartoon spectrum, Sega took the ingenious design means they’d already created,
and gave fans a powerful visual motive to generate an endless parade of original characters,
do not steal, embodying their own personalities and their
otherwise difficult to draw anime action ideals. though of course, having tapped
deeper into the look and feel of anime, or, to use the scientific terminology, “fuckable cartoons,”
Sonic Team also opened the floodgates to *#&@$~!YnOϱAʇOƨUɿOʜƆA!ƎƆIOႱƎЯ#%$&!@^*
By now, we fully understand the singular significance of Sony the Hordgehag’s character
design innovations, but what can we do with that wisdom? A fair bit. For example, it aids
us in understanding why, despite Sonic Boom being the funniest, best-written, best world-designed,
and best Amy and Knuckles containing iteration of the series to date, a large portion of
sonic’s fan base rejected it out of hand. Sonic Boom moves the characters out of the
“Kingdom Hearts Zone” and into the “One Piece Zone” – typically reached by starting with the
basic, filmic components of Anime and cartooning them up, as opposed to trying to make mickey
mouses anime-cool, and designing Disney-anime hybrid humans to fit alongside them. This is a
very subtle distinction. People have died over it. while Sonic Boom’s characters move a LOT more
naturally in 3D, they’re also a lot harder to visually reproduce. You gotta illustrate a lot of
different body types; perspective and proportions matter more. The layering of Sonic’s bandages is
very specific. If you’re making your own OC, you can’t just take the one body and head type, change
the spikes, colors, and fur patterns, and call it a day. You actually have to make the character fit
into this outbacky, junglepunk world, which even shadow feels a bit out of place in. This simply
isn’t the anime animal playground that Mobius was. Understanding this can help sonic team – and
others working with the brand – steer the series’ direction more confidently moving forward,
so we don’t get any more original Sonic movie designs. And on a broader level, having a firm
grasp on Sonic’s fundamental vegetocity and mickey mousiness can help the animators and artists
working with him get the most out of his design. For instance, if they had his hair spikes and
mono-eye cheat to face the camera the way that his side mouth already does,
and Mickey’s ears do in the Epic Mickey games, that might help bring 3D sonic up to the same
level of polish as sprite-based sonic. The theoretical ideal here is a sonic sidescroller
that looks like a 3D arc system works game. Tell me you wouldn’t play the shit out of that.
Most importantly, though, with this knowledge in hand, if we can also crack the design language
of undertale or homestuck, we can build a more complete theory of uncontrollably horny fandom
evolution, and using that knowledge… um…
I’m sure we’ll think of something eventually. To be honest, I mostly
just made this video as an excuse to say “double vegeta mickey mouse” out loud.
I’m Geoff Thew, Professional Shitbag, Signing Out From My Mother’s Basement