How the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’ Crew Delivered the Spikiest Sequel Yet

This article was written for the January ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 346).

‘We’re always just trying to go bigger every time and throw more scope and spectacle into the mix, but obviously, the most important thing is that we keep the heart and the emotion of these characters in the story.’

— Director Jeff Fowler

This holiday season’s eagerly anticipated Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie marks a full-circle moment for its director. Jeff Fowler, who helmed the first two movies in the franchise, as well as the first episode of the Knuckles series, has the privilege of bringing to the big screen one of the most beloved characters in video game history — Shadow the Hedgehog. When working for VFX studio Blur in the early 2000s, Fowler brushed shoulders with the franchise that would go on to be central to his career.

“Blur got hired by Sega to create cinematics for Shadow the Hedgehog, which was the spinoff game they gave to Shadow after he debuted in Sonic Adventure 2 and was such a massive success,” Fowler tells Animation Magazine. “I did some of the camerawork in the layout, but I also got to animate some stuff. That was 2004, exactly 20 years ago, which is crazy. To be here now, and to get to do this big cinematic version of Shadow and tell his story, it’s an incredibly full-circle moment, and I feel very fortunate to have been given the opportunity.”

Bringing Shadow, a character with a dark backstory and immense power, into the mix of the Sonic franchise called for a narrative that balanced the big and small. “We’re always just trying to go bigger every time and throw more scope and spectacle into the mix, but obviously, the most important thing is that we keep the heart and the emotion of these characters in the story,” Fowler explains. “I think it’s very easy to get carried away with wanting to go bigger and have fun with the action choreography, but you’ve got be telling a great story.”

Recapturing That Sonic Style

Just like the Knuckles series, the team employed a “speedboat vendor” approach, which meant spreading the animation load across six studios; Rising Sun Pictures, Rodeo FX, ILM, Fin, Marza and an in-house team at Paramount. For animation supervisor Clem Yip, the challenge was getting all these teams on the same page. “With many established characters, whether you’re talking Mickey Mouse or whoever, there’s always a style that this character lives in, whether it’s a look or a pose or personality,” he explains to Animation Magazine. “And so if you have multiple vendors, you have multiple teams you have to bring up to speed, so initially there’s an extra level of work that has to be done. But once you do that, because the work is spread out, you do have that opportunity to go back and say, ‘Maybe we push this a little bit more or polish that performance a little bit more.’”

The franchise’s capacity for action has increased through its three films, with Sonic 3 promising to be the most creative to date. “With Sonic 2, we finally had two characters that have superpowers, and we could really have them go at it. We could stage really exciting action, and it freed us up in some really great ways. With this third film with Shadow, it’s very similar, because Shadow is obviously even more impressive and powerful as an adversary, and he’s going to challenge Sonic, Tails and Knuckles in ways we haven’t seen,” Yip says.

“We had a lot of help from Tyson Hesse, who often helps with the storyboards to stage our action,” adds Yip. “You need to have cool camera angles that feature all the different characters doing their thing without taking anything away. It’s just about coming up with fun ideas of what they can do in any given action scene.”

Adapting Shadow to the screen proved to be a completely different task than bringing Sonic from the video game realm. “In the games, Sonic is all confidence, all attitude, all swagger — a hero through and through. But for the films, we knew we needed to give him more of an arc,” says Fowler. “There was a vulnerability that we needed, and that’s something Ben [Schwartz] brought with his performance; whereas Shadow doesn’t say a lot, but when he does say something it has a ton of weight. Those two provided a yin and yang of hedgehogs. I also give Keanu [Reeves] a ton of credit, because he really did his homework before he came in. He wanted to understand who he was playing and be able to make decisions that were informed by all the stuff that fans love about the character.”

Reeves’ approach to the role also provided clarity on how to animate Shadow. “He’s less broad than the other characters and more reserved in the range we can go with him,” explains Yip. “Keanu has a very particular style of delivery, which is really cool, and it meshes with Shadow’s personality. It’s lower key, a little bit more serious. So that right away informs the character performance.”

Along with the speedboat vendors, the use of puppet stand-ins for CG characters was also transplanted from the Knuckles show. The technique is similar to what was executed on the TV series. “We really enjoyed Knuckles just as an experiment,” says Fowler. “For the most part, it was just Knuckles in most of the episodes, so it didn’t require us to create a whole troupe of puppets and have all the puppeteers around all the time. But in Sonic 3, we’ve got four characters that are animated, and so we did bring in puppeteers when all the characters would be present in a scene and really committed to it.

“For the returning cast, they’re all completely pros and so used to how we work, but that doesn’t mean we’re not always trying to find ways to make them even more comfortable, especially with [child actor] Alyla Browne, who plays Maria. She’s got a fantastic imagination and would have been fine with the tennis ball, but when we’re creating those scenes and images of [her and Shadow] becoming best friends, it felt more natural for her to have something to play off of. The puppeteers every now and then would ad-lib or do something really funny, and then next thing you know it’s in the movie.”

Puppets Save the Day

Yip says on-set puppetry has become the norm. “In the earlier days of CG characters, it was less common,” he says. “But I think what people have realized is having something to act against, even if it’s just a puppet, gives the actors something to play off of — if for nothing else than getting the eyeline correct. If they don’t have anything to look at, people’s eyelines tend to wander, and that makes it very hard to look convincing in post.”

As the franchise evolves, Fowler looks forward to telling different kinds of stories every time. “We have Jim Carrey playing two characters in this movie; if that was all we did, I would be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m there,’” he exclaims. “But to also bring in Shadow, those two things instantly got everyone excited about getting back out there and doing another film. I think you’ll see it when the film is out. We’ve launched into a whole different style of storytelling and taken on an interesting tone, and the action and all of the film’s different elements have really grown in awesome ways.”

Paramount unleashes Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in U.S. theaters on December 20.