I'm seriously baffled by Sonic's design. It's hypnotizingly bad. I could probably make a better 3D model in Blender, and:
1) Any artistic skills I might once have had are super-rusty;
2) They never involved 3D modelling;
3) I never liked, cared about, or knew anything substantial about Sonic in the first place;
4) I suck at Blender;
5) I should not be trusted with designing a character for a major movie, with a budget and everything.
6) I'm one person, and I assume the model for the movie was made by a team. Presumably by professionals (?).
The rest of the trailer is pretty bad, but it's all usual "quick cash-in" bad (slow-motion scene that rips off that one scene from X-Men? Check. Jim Carrey? Check. Song that doesn't fit the movie at all? Checkity-check). But Sonic and the way he looks is like... I've seen better-designed creatures in mockbusters and in ill-conceived late-90s video games.
I am struggling to understand what chain of events led to this. My headcanon right now is that the graphic artists were underpaid and overworked, they threw this together as a joke, and no-one in the chain of command noticed, because Hollywood executives are kinda famously out of touch with reality. I honestly can't imagine someone creating a 3D model like this when they were not *trying* to make it look bad.
Humans in the first Toy Story movie are less eerily creepy by far, and the movie was made in early 90s, so it has an excuse.
[/rant]
EDIT: also, I've already seen a few artists on DeviantArt drawing fan art of he Sonic from the trailer. They actually gush about how great the trailer was, which seriously made my jaw drop. Plot twist: their fan art is EASILY better than the Sonic from the trailer. Much, much better.