I know that I may be in a little in the minority here as one who says that this version of Sonic is at least as good as the others have been (and quite a lot better than two of them), but I do find it annoying that one of the - albeit small - reasons that it’s getting criticism is because of the fact that it looks like and plays like a stereotypical anime. Well, for the record it looks like a anime because it is one, as it was commissioned by Sega of Japan. The series release also happened - roughly - to tie in with the release of the Sonic Adventure games for Nintendo’s - then new - GameCube console.
Yes the series used story elements from those games, but not until the third – or something – season and even then I personally thought that they had worked better as animated stories than they did as games; if only because Sonic’s 3D games have so far been underwhelming to play. The juxtaposition of humans into Sonic’s ‘world’ may be annoying, but this is Sega of Japan’s version of Sonic, not Archie’s. Every variant of Japan’s version of Sonic has pointed to his world being Earth, even if it’s a parallel one here, while in the west it ended up being called Mobius. Personally I was very glad to see the proper characters of the real Sonic cannon have some screen time for once, because it was certainly less jarring than seeing characters I’d never seen before (i.e. just about everyone from SatAM).
Perhaps I’m being a tad dramatic, but so far I’ve watched and endured the Adventures series, enjoyed the SatAM series (in spite of my tirade above might suggest) and tried to completely ignored the Underground one. None of them would I list as absolutely amazing, essential viewing, though saying that SatAM was a good show, certainly good enough for me to go and buy the series on DVD.
I’ve been watching the show in both the original Japanese and the English dub (no prizes for guessing which is the better). It’s the oddest aspect of dubbing that people forget where something comes from, or maybe it is because of the fact that companies in the west have been emulating the look of anime. People got used to the fact that the first three Sonics where made in the USA that this threw them. Some the episodes have been re-edited during the translation as far as I’ve been able to tell, the Japanese action orientated theme song has been replaced by some generic junk in the US and suffered through an even worse one in the UK. Nevertheless, the fundamental truth is that Sonic and companies Japanese voices are much more convincing that the US faux-cool ones.
Unfortunately there are still too many problems to really recommend Sonic X. During the start of the show things take a while to pick up in pace story wise, as the makers felt it necessary to introduce the various characters after a glimpse of each on the first episode’s raid on Eggman’s base. While the series does have a continuality, with the search for the chaos emeralds and battles with Dr. Eggman, some episodes are really no better than mere filler, which never help matters in this regard.
The human characters to aren’t that interesting and while this may be a anime, clichés are still clichés and one can’t help but wish some more work had either been done to really flesh those characters out, or whether Tokyo Movie Shinsha could have found a way to set the series around Sonic and his anthropomorphic friends.
Lastly Dr. Eggman is, regardless of language, hard to sometimes take seriously as a real threat. This later point is not hugely strange, considering that Dr. Eggman (or Robotnik as the West called him), was always meant to be something of a comic villain in the games anyway; especially in the later 3D games. It’s hard to take a villain totally seriously when his weapons are called things like Egg O’ Matic and the Death Egg (both these are from the original games by the way).
While at times the animation side of things can be a little lacklustre, and some of the episodes based on the first Sonic Adventure game look a tad odd, the series generally looks and moves quite competently. The animation is better in some places than others and yes the animators do tend to cheat in the same way that happens in various other anime. However it is a series that in some ways looks better in stills than it does moving. Some awkward juxtaposition of not quite working CGI with the animation doesn’t help, neither does the fact that many of the CGI models are also rendered as cel drawings in certain close-ups: making them jar even more as they go from one to the other.
In the end though it’s not the best animated sonic to grace the screen, that honour also goes to the SatAM version, even thought this one definitely looks better in stills. It is also far from being the worse, to which I would call Sonic Underground and that’s with 4Kids at the translating helm, a company who hardly have a reputation for decent dubbing. Still those prepared to hunt down the original Japanese version will find a superior product, although maybe not in leaps and bounds. Much like the 3D games have been when compared to the 2D ones.
Still, at least it’s a great deal better than Japan’s previous attempt at animating Sega’s mascot.
/ 4 reviews)
Reviews for Sonic X
