Sonic the Hedgehog is predominantly a video game character and franchise but has had quite a few stints in animation over the years.
Recently, SEGA has put out some short-form animated content alongside video game releases.
Sonic Mania and
Team Sonic Racing are a couple of Sonic the Hedgehog video games that released and alongside them came
Sonic Mania Adventures and
Team Sonic Racing Overdrive respectively.
The director of animation at SEGA recently participated in an interview with
Comicbook.com in which they discussed the future of
Sonic the Hedgehog in animation. Yukio Kusumoto confirmed to the site that more short-form animated content will be released alongside future video game releases — presumably in the same way that the aforementioned bunch handled it.
Kusumoto first spoke about the reception to
Sonic Mania Adventures and
Team Sonic Racing Overdrive — specifically about releasing them online rather than how animated content would be traditionally distributed.
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.
SEGA's director of animation then revealed that we should expect similar content to come:
"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."