The Creative Forces Behind ‘Knuckles’ Give Us the Scoop on the Paramount+ Series

This article was written for the May '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 340).

1994 was a special year for Sega. The company solved the problem of their flagship game, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, far exceeding a reasonable file size by splitting it into two games, giving birth to Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (later known as one game — Sonic 3 & Knuckles). Thirty years later, Paramount is helping the historic game studio repeat the trick.

Ahead of the December release of the third installment in the Sonic the Hedgehog movie franchise, Paramount+ will be home to Knuckles, a six-episode spinoff series focusing on Idris Elba’s deadpan echidna last seen in 2022’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2. His villain-to-hero arc continues as he is tasked with training cowardly town sheriff Wade Whipple (Adam Pally) to be a fearsome warrior.

This nod to video game history was an intentional move by the executive producing team behind Knuckles: Toby Ascher, Jeff Fowler and Neal Moritz. The storylines of the games guided the team on how to map out their franchise. “We did Sonic 2 and brought in Tails and Knuckles, and then the next step is Sonic 3 with the Knuckles expansion pack,” Ascher tells Animation Magazine.

Besides showing reverence for Sega’s past, Ascher, Fowler and Moritz were also keen to take advantage of the path laid by Marvel to build out the wider universe of their intellectual property and attempt longer-form storytelling. “One of the things that we really like that Marvel does is looking at Sonic as not just a video game movie but a world where we can tell stories in a lot of different genres,” Ascher explains. “For us, Sonic 1 was our take on a buddy comedy like Midnight Run or Dumb & Dumber. Sonic 2 was our version of an Indiana Jones movie, a globe-trotting quest to find the Master Emerald. Now, Knuckles is a throwback to ’90s comedies that I grew up loving. We talked about Happy Gilmore, The Big Lebowski and Kingpin while making it.” The limited series creates room for smaller, lighter stories in between their versions of Avengers movies.

Great Expectations

The Sonic films operate on such a scale that made translating their world to the limits of TV a challenge. Ascher had high expectations of what could be achieved with the series. “In the ’90s, there were these TV rip-off versions of big movies. I remember watching Men in Black: The Series, and we knew that if it became that, it could damage what we built with the Sonic film brand,” Ascher says. For Knuckles to feel congruent with upcoming installments the show also had to push beyond what previous movies had achieved. “Knuckles has 1,600 animation shots, which is 300 more than Sonic 1, but it is exactly the same quality and literally the same character assets as those in Sonic 3,” says Ascher.

‘You want the character animation to have that sharper timing and really dialed-in expressions and poses.’

— Director Jeff Fowler

The entire animation pipeline was shifted to accommodate this ambition, particularly when it came to the team’s relationships with their vendors. “On the last couple of Sonic movies we’ve worked with one vendor, which led to some problems — one being that if they fall behind you’re stuck with them,” says Ascher. “We knew we needed to do a large amount of animation in a short amount of time, so one of the big changes we made is that while usually the vendor controls the assets that they rig, we made an investment in the Sonic assets and we built them in-house. We then went to six different vendors: ILM, RSP, Fin, Outpost, Untold and an in-house team.”

“They were willing to work with us on a system where we control the rig asset in-house and allowed that to be worked over by six different vendors. That allowed us to create what we called ‘speedboat vendors,’ where they could each take a sequence or two and it would look exactly the same as what we had, allowing us to [do] quality control internally. The other thing it allowed us to do is build a pretty hefty in-house team of animators who just worked for Sonic 3 and Knuckles. We could do our own animation shots on it, so we could keep costs down and move faster.”

Jeff Fowler, who directed the first episode of Knuckles (as well as all three Sonic the Hedgehog movies), was keen to stress the collaboration he had with each studio. “The technical side wasn’t as important as the creative engagement,” he points out. “You have six different vendors, but you want all the animation to look like it’s coming from one place and so a lot of that just comes down to communication.”

As a director, Fowler looked to enhance the on-set experience for both the actors and animators. “One thing we did, which we haven’t done in the past, is have an on-set puppeteer with a Knuckles puppet so the actor has something to respond to,” explains Fowler. “We can then do blocking with the puppeteer. You don’t want your CG characters to be standing there dead in the water in one spot the whole time; you want them to move around and use the space.” This provided freedom from the restrictions enforced by the approach taken on Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 where actors were tasked with playing off a tennis ball on a stick.

Elsewhere in the industry, motion capture is used to negate the tennis ball problem, but the idea of using it for the Sonic franchise was dismissed early on due to the proportions of the characters’ bodies being much more top-heavy than that of a human. CG animation enhances the exaggerated designs of the Sonic characters and has them slot naturally into live action.

“What we do with these films ends up more like a feature animation where you’re looking for a slightly more stylized performance,” says Fowler. “You want the comedic timing. What Ben [Schwartz, voice of Sonic], Colleen [O’Shaughnessey, voice of Tails] and Idris give us is an animation in their performance. You want the character animation to have that sharper timing and really dialed-in expressions and poses. Even though we’re putting them into a live-action world with human actors, I always try to nudge things a little closer to a more stylized take on it.”

Storyboards to the Rescue

Also similar to the feature animation process is Knuckles’ reliance on storyboards. In a live-action hybrid show, storyboards have use beyond knowing where to put the camera. Fowler says, “You could be filming a plate. It’s supposed to be a scene of Sonic talking to Knuckles, but if there’s no human actor there it’s like you’re shooting nothing.” Through storyboards, the crew is able to better visualize what the final product will be.

The objective of Ascher, Fowler and Moritz boils down to doing right by Sonic fans of all persuasions. Ascher says, “This year, fans are going to get an extra three-hour movie in addition to Sonic 3, just like the expansion pack,” serving new fans while nodding to those who have been around for 30 or more years. Looking forward to their showstopping feature this December, Ascher adds, “We have all played rigorous amounts of Sonic Adventure and are focused on telling our biggest, most exciting story. We can’t wait for you guys to see it.”