Meet your friendly neighborhood webslingers
It’s not a stretch to say that most superhero movies are animated. Sure, they have live actors in them and the art is largely photorealistic renderings of comic book art, but there are teams and teams of animators, designers, and other artists that bring these films to life for all audiences to enjoy.
Effects are so expected now that they don’t seem especially special. In fact, the most special of special effects are practical. We so seldom see something actually created, or done, that it’s become a novelty.
When Disney announced a new “live action” version of The Lion King, reasonable people scoffed—not just because it’s completely unnecessary, but because it’s no less animated than the original.
And so drawing a distinction between an Avengers film and the latest Marvel/Sony superhero joint Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse by calling one animated and the other live action is a little silly.
If anything, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is simply a more stylized form of animation. Beyond that, the film is as funny, creative, and entertaining as any Marvel film to date (and significantly better than most Sony pictures of late). In fact, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse may rank in the upper echelons of any Marvel film. It’s that good.
The film begins with Peter Parker (Chris Pine), who recaps everything we already know: radioactive spiders, Uncle Ben, Aunt May, Mary Jane, Green Goblin, awkward dancing, etc. This version of Spider-Man isn’t the goofy teen that disintegrated at the end of the last Avengers movie. He’s more the Sam Raimi/Toby McGuire Spider-Man that was the focus of two of the best superhero movies ever made, long before superheroes shared cinematic universes.
But Peter Parker isn’t the focus of the film. Instead, this film focuses on a young Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a future Spider-man in the making. In case you haven’t heard, there are lots of Spider-Men in the Spider-Verse.
The film takes the notion of the infinite universes theory and runs with it. Kingpin, Spider-Man villain and absolute unit, has bankrolled a particle accelerator that is capable of opening doors to parallel universes. After Miles has his own encounter with a super-spider, he accidentally stumbles onto the experiment, which brings many different Spider-People into Miles’ universe.
There’s Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), a middle aged, divorced, overweight Spider-Man, Gwen Stacy (Hailee Stanfield) as Spider-Woman, Spider-Man Noir (Nick Cage), a black and white Spider-Man from 1933, Penii Parker (Kimiko Glenn), an anime version of the character featuring a middle school girl with a robot, and Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), an anthropomorphic pig with characteristics of a Warner Brothers cartoon.
The multiple Spider-Folk have to race against time to return to their own universe and stop Kingpin from destroying his own.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is so good that it’s hard to know where to start. The animation, for instance, is stunning. It features a textured comic book design in a 3D world, what you would imagine the world would look like if you stepped inside a comic book panel.
This is a new technique, developed for the film, where CGI works in concert with more traditional methods, making it look both hand drawn and computer rendered. It’s an artistic achievement that can’t be overstated.
Even within the film, which had its own revolutionary design for in world characters, the animators had to adapt the style of accommodate different comic types from other universes, with using art styles from anime to noir to classic cartoon, all integrated seamlessly within the same story.
It’s a wonder to behold.
But beyond just the animation, the story is tight and emotional and funny, effortlessly acted and performed by a supremely talented cast, including those listed above as well as Lily Tomlin, Natalie Morales, Live Schreiber, Zoe Kravitz, and Mahershala Ali just to name a few. If you are a comic book fan, an action movie fan, or just a fan of good movies, I can’t imagine a reason why you wouldn’t want to see this film.
Of course, there is someone, somewhere talking about the glut of superhero films and franchises that saturate the marketplace and take studio dollars from other, potentially more original films.
It’s a valid point, to be sure, but maybe it should be one saved for Aquaman or the next Marvel Cinematic Universe vehicle.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is good enough to transcend such talk.