I posted this on Twitter awhile ago (I might even make a full video on this) and I think it’s worth posting here
The core difference between the Sonic movie and Detective Pikachu and why everyone hates Sonic but loves Pikachu is this: Detective Pikachu didn’t sacrifice the game design for the sake of realism
They didn’t try and make all of the Pokemon resemble ‘real’ animals, they all look like themselves; lifted straight out of the games.
And it would have been EASY for them to just include Pokemon that only look like animals, but they’re also including the Pokemon with weirder designs, like Mr. Mime above, and Golurk, which is literally a rock golem
Now compare this to Sonic…
Sonic went too far in trying to make him a ‘real’ animal, resulting in him looking like a hairy little gremlin. He looks like a human wearing a costume…
Like, look at how Detective Pikachu designed Charmander
This comes from the D. Pikachu line of Pokemon cards btw
Now, what if they tried to make him a “real” animal, he’d end up looking something like..
You see the problem?
You made him a real animal, but he only looks like an approximation of what he’s supposed to look like… that’s why people hate the Sonic movie design so much and why you see so many people trying to fix it online.
There’s this weird fear that a distinctly cartoony design can’t work when you’re trying to put a CG character next to real people and that it HAS to look realistic… and that’s simply not true. it’s been PROVEN not true!
Detective Pikachu gets this, their designs are a perfect middle-ground between realistic and cartoon
Let cartoon characters BE cartoon characters
gummycore
