"....Hi honey! Uh... you ever wanted a pet hedgehog?"
Tom arrives in San Francisco and parks his roofless truck in front of his sister-in-law’s house. His wife Maddie had been staying at Rachel’s with their dog, Ozzy, while looking for an apartment. He hides Sonic in a blanket and knocks at the door. Rachel (Natasha Rothwell) tries to block his way, but Maddie is willing to let him in. Reminder that Tom Wachowski is currently wanted and considered a domestic terrorist. Robotnik having the full power of the U.S. Government backing him is scary. The sisters argue some more, but Rachel’s daughter Jojo (Melody Niemann) greets “uncle Tommy”, hugging him. Finally, one happy voice in here! Heck, even Ozzy is barking like crazy at the blanket in Tom’s arms!
The arguing continues while Ozzy tugs at the blanket, pulling it off and revealing the unconscious alien to all. Rachel faints. Ah, finally some silence in here.
Obviously, the live-action filming was done before VFX, and thus, before the design change, so the acting puppet was of Ugly Sonic. This one doesn't look too bad, I guess.
Okay, we’ll resume the plot after a moment, I just want to address something again. One aspect of art is that we enjoy the end product but rarely realize just how hard it can be to get there. How much work goes into it. That’s especially true for visual effects, where the goal is to either not notice that something was changed, or to make the audience believe that what was added really was there. The latter is the goal that live-action films with CGI characters strive to achieve. In my opinion, one of the best ways to do this is to have the animated characters have believable physical interactions with the human characters. In my opinion, the more these unreal characters interact with the real world, the better it feels.
A lot of that trickery can be achieved using puppets or stand-in actors. As an example, at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, when Drax pets Rocket, it’s James Gunn’s brother Sean sitting there in a greenscreen jumpsuit, positioned to account for Rocket’s size. The Sonic franchise? It’s puppets; the bonus features on the DVD for the Knuckles miniseries shows some behind-the-scenes with puppet Knuckles. It’s great. I love me some behind-the-scenes.
