The
Sonic the Hedgehog franchise mainly consists of video games and the like but there have also been a few animated shows in the mix — not to mention the live-action movie that's in the works at Paramount.
Some recent example of
Sonic the Hedgehog in animation would be
Sonic Mania Adventures and
Team Sonic Racing Overdrive. Both of those series are short-form animated content which released via YouTube. At that, they both debuted alongside similarly titled video games — those being
Sonic Mania and
Team Sonic Racing respectively.
Both of the shows were quite positively received by fans. The head of animation at SEGA recently spoke about the reception to both
Sonic Mania Adventures and
Team Sonic Racing Overdrive (via
Toonado), stating that he's greatly appreciative of the immediate and positive response that releasing online allowed them.
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.
Yukio Kusumoto also then revealed that they're planning to release more animated content of the sort in the future.
"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."