A Very Sonic Christmas

A Very Sonic Christmas

Original Release Date: December 11th, 2024

The last time I was reviewing some animated "Sonic the Hedgehog" media, the speedy hero and his friends were celebrating Halloween, the only good holiday. And every American boy and girl knows what season comes after the ghosts and ghouls are put away for another year. If you said Thanksgiving, you fell into my trap. As far as retail stores and marketing companies are concerned, Thanksgiving and all of November are mere blips on the radar on the way to consumerism's high holy day. Yeah, we are talking about the Christ Mass, the two thousand year old project to absorb various pagan winter festivals under the banner of "civilized" religion. Symbols like trees that remain green throughout the coldest and most frigid months, horned deities rising from the woods to reward the faithful and punish the wicked, worship of celestial bodies, and celebrating those we love and hold dear because we might freeze to death by next year have now lost their meaning even further. Instead of being about some guy from the Middle East that asked us to consider loving each other and redistributing wealth to the poor, these potent icons have now been thoroughly secularized in pursuit of the only true religion humanity has left: The hoarding of goods and resources, consumerism's hollow but relentless demand to always buy more, have more, need more. Ya see why I'd rather hang out with the skeletons and black cats?

But if Christmas is going to be meaningless and commercial, it should at least be weird and stupid too. The hybridizing of arcane symbols and corporate advertising has riddled the modern winter landscape with all sorts of oddities. The Yule Goat and Krampus have been replaced with far stranger modern figures. A green-furred thief, a dancing beagle, and diabetic polar bears are the friendly beasts of our modern yuletide. If there's any tradition of modern Christmas that I adore, it's weird seasonal specials and commercials that filter whatever iconography of the holiday they can exploit through their own temporary goals. This is how the Wacky Wall Crawlers and a home-intruding Michaelangelo have become reoccurring visitors during my personal winter celebrations. There's a tacky, surreal quality to these bygone bits of festive pop culture debris that I find endearing.

Because video games have been hot holiday gift items for many years now, we've had quite a few cross-breedings of wintery frivolity and various  interactive computer entertainment characters. Christmas came to Pac-Land in 1982 and Mario has been wearing a Santa Beard since at least 1989. All of which is to say that Sonic the Hedgehog is no stranger to the Christmas holiday. As I have chronicled multiple times in the past, there have been repeated attempts to associate Sega's fast blue hedgehog with the yearly December event. Robotnik has dressed up like Santa Claus and been visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve, while it has long been accepted that Sonic and friends look a-friggin'-dorable dressed up in wintery gear and dashing through the snow. We don't yet know what the hedgehog and his pals think of the Christ Child but the strictly secular version of the holiday seems to be a big favorite with them. 

At least in North America, the third "Sonic the Hedgehog" motion picture came out in theaters five days before December 25th. The movie itself had nothing to do with Christmas but "Sonic the Hedgehog 3's" proximity to the day led someone to a clever idea for an advertising tie-in. On the eleventh of the same month, Paramount Pictures uploaded a two minute long animated short to their various social media pages entitled "A Very Sonic Christmas." (There's at least four official uploads to YouTube and I'm sure it's also available on Instareel, FaceBake, TikCok, and X the Everything Website.) Some real money was out into this glorified commercial too. The "Sonic" screenwriter duo of Pat Casey and Josh Miller wrote it. All the big name celebrity voice actors reprised their roles and a spiffy, stop motion presentation brought the entire project to life. 

The story invokes "Sonic's Christmas Blast" a little too, though I don't know if that was deliberate so much as a parody of the exact same type of formulaic holiday special writing. In the bleak midwinter, Sonic is introducing Tails and Knuckles to all the earthly holiday traditions of Christmas. They put up a colorfully festooned tree, don their gay apparel, and leave out a treat for Jolly Ol' Saint Nicholas. Knuckles and Tails ask how the fat old elf can make his global trip in a single night. Presumably confirming the existence of Santa Claus as a factual canon in the movie-verse, Sonic uses a Warp Ring to pull the mythical figure right into the Wachowski's living room. This injures the jolly old elf's ankle, threatening the Christmas gift-giving spree. Luckily, a super-fast hero is right here, ready and willing to fill Santa's galoshes. One colorful montage later and Sonic has saved Christmas. 

Despite many of them being upwards of fifty years old at this point, the Rankin/Bass television specials like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "A Year Without a Santa Claus" continue to run on TV every December. That means many people instantly associate the stodgy but charming stop-motion animation of these programs with the warm and fuzzy, nostalgic feelings they have for the holiday. Being such old, established parts of the December season with such a distinctive visual style also makes the Rankin/Bass specials an endless source of parody. Animator and filmmaker David H. Hess has come to specialize in riffing on this time-honored tradition. In 2005, he created an animated short in this style for "Saturday Night Live" entitled "Christmas Time for the Jews." Since then, he's directed a snarky hour long Christmas special starring Fred Savage, predictably grisly spoof "A Predator Holiday Special," and a stop-motion segment in a Captain Underpants Christmas installment. On the less ironic end of the spectrum, Hess has also made some similarly old-fashioned holiday fair starring Mickey Mouse. This extremely specific niche is one Hess seems happy to fill and he would do it again with "A Very Sonic Christmas." (He also worked on early YouTube hit "Dinosaur Office" and, uh, those annoying animations I used to see at Denny's at four o'clock in the morning, proving he doesn't only do Christmas stuff.) 

I don't think Hess' style looks that much like the old Rankin/Bass cartoons. The models are lankier with way bigger eyes and toothier months than the characters in "Jack Frost" or "The Leprechaun's Christmas Gold" or whatever. They represent a compromise between that style and the traditional live action "Sonic" movie designs. Quirks like giving Sonic a little strip of blue fur between his weird cyclops eye look good on the CGI models and a little awkward here. The result are models that mildly ugly, perhaps. Nevertheless, "A Very Sonic Christmas" does look cute and charming. It maintains the tactile quality that is, to me, the main ability of stop-motion animation. Santa – voiced by Adam Pally, so they didn't have to rope a new actor in or anything – looks cute, as goes the snow-covered back drop of a traditional “Sonic” level, with its loops and such. 

For something that runs exactly two minutes and seven seconds, “A Very Sonic Christmas” is entertaining. The ugly sweaters the trio wear are personalized to each of the characters: Sonic's has a chili dog on it, Knuckles has grapes, and Tails has a bi-plane. That was cute. Idris Elba's delivery of lines about Santana and Christmas being canceled made me chuckle. Ben Schwartz' take on Sonic are enthusiastic as ever. Shadow's cameo in the final minutes functions as a decent punchline, while reminding us that Shadow and Keanu Reeves are in this movie. Packed into a little over two minutes, when paired with the distinctive visual style, it makes for a clever and pleasant extended commercial. 

But “A Very Sonic Christmas” isn't only a two minute spot and quasi-short film. It's also a self-contained Christmas carol! Released concurrently with the little short was a song with the very similar title, “It's a Sonic Christmas,” credited to Ruwanga Samath. I don't know who that is by glancing at his Wikipedia page informs me he is a Sri Lanka-born music producer who seems to have mostly worked in making songs and incidental music for motion pictures. He worked on a Busta Rhymes' song for “Fast Five” and a bunch of songs for some Netflix things before this. As a holiday single, “It's a Sonic Christmas” is cute enough. It's catchy and jangly. I like the chant of “Go Sonic!/Go Tails!/Go Knuckles!” that makes up the chorus. Reminds me of a Shuki Levi theme song. We hear a bit of the song in the short but the entire version – which recaps the plot of the entire thing – is easily found. Will it find its way onto my Christmas playlist? Probably not, because I'm extremely picky about what Christmas music I deem tolerable. It will, however, find its way into my collection of songs with some connection to the “Sonic” franchise! 

As far as “Sonic” related Christmas specials go, I suppose “A Very Sonic Christmas” is the best. It's shorter and less embarrassing than “Sonic's Christmas Blast” and has more to do with the holiday than “Chao in Space,” which would otherwise win. I don't know if I liked it better than the holiday episode of “Sonic Mania Adventure” though. But it's cute. The amount of work put into essentially a longer commercial represents the kind of commitment to the bit that I can respect. I'm glad this thing and the corresponding song exists, even if I'm ultimately not sure it's worth the amount of words I've typed to talk about it. But that's true of everything! Merry Christmas to all – including those who celebrate Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, as a menorah and kinara are present in the background of this short – and to all a good night. [7/10]