As an animation exercise, I wanted to study some of Sonic's idle animations across multiple games. I realized that there is a huge juxtaposition in some of these, so I wanted to ask you all a question.

Which of these poses tells us more about the character?

I'm going to cover each of these poses individually and what they succeed/fail at.

Looking at Rush's, you can see that Sonic is constantly moving, even though he's not even going anywhere. Hell, he's marginally more bouncy in the source material than in my study (notice how here, his foot even rises off the ground a bit).

Sonic is a hero, but he's also this cocky, energetic teenager. Even though he's fighting to save the world from Eggman, he's not *too* serious about it. He's impatient, hyperactive, and ready to get going at a moment's notice.

This stance does such a good job of conveying the most important facets of Sonic's peresonality. The constant motion really sells the fact that Sonic is anxious and ready to run. As soon as the player hits right, he's off. Yes, he's jittery, but that's the point.

Moving onto Generations... like... what am I supposed to glean from this???

Out of all of these 3 poses, Generations' falls the most flat BY FAR. There is NOTHING interesting about this pose. It's static, it's symmetrical. Sonic's limbs are splayed out in such a stiff fashion. The only movement we're seeing here is the most subtle breathing motions.

His torso very subtly sways from side to side, and his fingers gently tense up between motions, but aside from that, there is nothing going on here. Nothing that screams "SONIC THE HEDGEHOG". I could not tell you a single thing about this character from this pose alone.

Sonic may not be running, sure, but there has to be at least some semblance of character portrayed in even the simplest of poses, especially when talking about a character as big as Sonic. It boggles my mind that this was the pose they went with for such an important entry lmao.

I will say that Generations does sort of make up for this with some charming, in-character fidgets that, unlike the base idle animation, do a fantastic job of portraying Sonic's personality. It's just awkward to not have this consistency between these two phases of his idle.

Forces is a bit of an interesting case. There's some things I enjoy about this stance, but oh boy does it also have it's fair share of issues.

Let's start with the good first: the pose itself. Immediately, this pose does a much better job of being visually interesting purely by breaking Sonic out of the plane of symmetry. That's all it takes to make a pose just that more enjoyable to look at.

Personality-wise, it does a decent job of demonstrating character. Considering the tone of this game, it makes sense to have Sonic's heroic side become more prominent in his poses. His foot is forward, fists clenched. He's more confident and determined and this pose does sell it.

...and that's about all I can say for this pose before it falls flat. Again, WHERE IS THE MOVEMENT?

I kid you not when I say that I looked at this pose for a good 5 minutes trying to find any semblance of motion coming from this stance. It's somehow more static than Generations.

Sonic almost looks like a taxidermied animal. The only thing I could find from this stiff, static pose is the ever-so-slight head and chest movement, but it's so unbelievably hard to notice. It's so unnatural and off-putting when considering Sonic's personality.

And while it does a better job of portraying a facet of Sonic's personality to match the tone of the game, there could've been a bit more effort of portraying the fact that Sonic is... you know...

alive?

It just goes to show how important simple animations like these are. Animation is about telling a story through motion. You want to be able to know everything about a character at a glance. Idle animations are a perfect opportunity to demonstrate just that.