thinking about how they built sonic's cave and how they built sonic's quill and how they built sonic rolled up as a ball and how they built robotnik's fucking hovership and actually wrecked tom's car and shot the tower with a drone and how they fucking made a gun helicopter and got real wolves in the real snow and got a bazillion cop cars for the chase scene and despite the fact that their main character and now two more are fully cgi they use as much practical effects as possible, even if only sonic is in the scene they built the set and swing the tire around for him to be on it and they even talked about the possibility of building robotnik's machines. they only used green screen when absolutely necessary and even built parts of the mushroom planet for jim carrey to interact with. the animation is beautiful and that's partly because practical effects do half the things that other directors would have made the cgi people do because i'd be easier on them and also set/makeup/prop people have unions. in the director's commentary jeff fowler says that jurassic park and movies of that time are what got him into cgi and the medium and that makes complete sence because jurassic park was a masterful mix of cgi and practical effects, straight up building an entire t-rex robot, that kind of mixing magic that jurassic world didn't even want to do. the movie looks so real and that's partly because it is real. so much of that is real.