Over the years,
Sonic the Hedgehog has had quite a few stints in animation despite most notably being a video game franchise. Recently, the two mediums have intermingled as video game releases have brought along with them short-form animated content.
For examepl,
Sonic Mania Adventures and
Team Sonic Racing Overdrive made their debut alongside
Sonic Mania and
Team Sonic Racing respectively — the former pair are animated series while the latter two are video games.
Comicbook.com recently spoke with Yukio Kusumoto about the animated content that SEGA has put out as of late. Kusomoto is the director of animation at the studio and he spoke about the reception to the likes of
Sonic Mania Adventures and
Team Sonic Racing Overdrive.
It has been incredible. I've been in animation space for about 15 years, and primarily I've been producing TV shows. I never actually released anything online directly and immediately [...] within an hour all of these comments came in, and all positive comments; comments like, "this is what I've been waiting for, this is great, finally,” saying I did it right. The response to Sega's previous show, Sonic Boom had been kind of mixed, I mean mostly positive, but some people weren't too sure about the take that Sonic Boom had, but Sonic Mania Adventures is all about classic Sonic, the very beginning of the Sonic iterations. And because this show didn't have dialogue, the character had a very rich facial expressions and mannerisms that people responded very, very positively to from the very beginning.
Kusumoto then confirmed that more short-form animated content is in the works.
"I can say we have a plan of continuing this trend creating short-form content per game release, and we can't announce yet, but several projects have been planned; for those projects, we are in early development, but yes, we will continue releasing this type of content."