Jeff Fowler makes fast, loud, capable family films from a video game, and the best thing in each of them is Jim Carrey. He knows when to get out of an actor's way; he has not yet found a quiet moment of his own.
Fi1m perspective
In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Jim Carrey's Dr. Robotnik dances alone in the back of his lorry, and Jeff Fowler lets him. Nothing else in the film is that patient. It is the right call, and it tells you what kind of director Fowler is: one who can spot the thing that works and give it room, even when the thing that works is not the hedgehog on the poster.
He came up as a computer animator, joining Blur Studio after Ringling College of Art and Design in 2002 and directing the short Gopher Broke (2004), and he had worked on the games themselves, Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) among them, long before anyone gave him a feature. The feature nearly did not happen. The first trailer for Sonic showed a hedgehog nobody could look at, the outcry was immediate, and Fowler went back and redrew him the way the games had. That he did so, and that the result was pleasant company, is to his credit. It also set the pattern. Fowler listens, adjusts and delivers; what he has not yet done is put an idea of his own on screen and hold it there.
With the same writers, Pat Casey and Josh Miller, the same producer, Tim Miller, and Ben Schwartz's voice in the hedgehog each time, he has made Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022), which we have not reviewed, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024), which we have and which is the best of them by a little. It gives Carrey two Robotniks and lets him run, brings on Keanu Reeves's Shadow, faster and angrier than any of the others, and it tries for grief. It settles for volume. Fowler has said that the simple things matter, "character and grounded emotion", and the films agree with him in every speech and hardly ever in the staging. Sonic's loneliness is mentioned in the first film and never once shown at rest.
We laughed out loud at Carrey four or five times in that first film, more than we expected, and each time we knew the line was not funny and the man saying it was. That is Fowler in miniature. He builds a sound, competent machine around whichever performer is willing to be enormous, and he has not yet found the still shot that would let his own material carry any weight. The films are quick, likeable and forgotten within the hour. The children they are made for do not mind, and we do not begrudge them.
He directed the pilot of Knuckles (2024), and he is attached to a fourth Sonic and to a Pink Panther. A cartoon lead and a comedy that lives in a man with a moustache: he has been rehearsing for that one for five years. The fourth Sonic will tell us whether he can also manage one quiet minute we believe. We would like to see it.
Biography
Jeff Fowler is an American film director and animator. He is known for directing the Sonic the Hedgehog film series, including Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024). He also directed the pilot episode of the television series Knuckles (2024) and served as an executive producer on the series.
Fowler graduated from the Ringling College of Art and Design in 2002. He began his career at Blur Studio, where he wrote and directed the animated short Gopher Broke (2004), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. He contributed original stories to the anthology series Love, Death & Robots (2019).
