Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse made history when it was released a few weeks ago as the longest American-made animated film to date – yet you’ll find yourself disbelievingly checking the time after leaving the theater, as this captivating cinematic experience will leave you on the edge of your seat, wishing for thirty more minutes.
Five years after the film’s predecessor (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), the narrative picks back up with teenager Miles Morales embarking on a cross-dimensional chase of an elusive villain, grappling with hundreds of Spider-men who serve as different variants of the arachnid-themed superhero in their respective dimensions, and struggling to find a way to reveal his web-slinging identity to his overbearing parents.
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The 140-minute feature has already received an overwhelming number of positive reviews and critical acclaim, topping the film-discovery social platform Letterboxd as one of the highest-rated films ever within four days of its release. ‘Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse,’ the final feature in the three-film series, is slated to be released in March of next year.
So, what makes Sony’s take on Spider-Man so refreshing in a landscape oversaturated with not just superhero movies, but countless adaptations of the spidery hero himself? Their incredibly distinctive animation style, combined with refreshingly unique characterization and storylines.
Sony’s Spider-Verse movies adopt a stylistic potpourri of 2-D, 3-D and comic book features in their animation. The film breaks out of a traditional animation style in a tribute to Spider-Man’s comic book origins, seen in the inclusion of direction lines in quick movements and action shots, and frenetic squiggles that dance around each spider-man’s head in a thrillingly accurate depiction of the classic “spider-sense” that warns the superhero of impending danger. Onomatopoeias and speech bubbles caption certain scenes, and comic book ‘dots’ as well as cross-sectional sketch lines can be seen in close shots of characters’ faces. Every frame appears as a beautiful, seemingly hand-drawn page of art.
The film is further elevated through its combination of 2-D and 3-D techniques, using CGI animation. CGI is often unnecessarily confined to ‘realism’ when used in 3-D animation, which can limit character movements. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse creates an original ‘2.5-D’ animation in also incorporating the looser, more exaggerated style typical of 2D animation, which breathes life into the film as various Spider-men bends the laws of physics in typical superhero fashion.
The film’s groundbreaking use of animation also carries over into its development of the many, many characters it features. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse somehow finds the perfectly captivating gray area in between a chaotic amalgamation of characters multidimensionally world-hopping and the simple, relatability of their relationships and problems. Despite the overwhelming volume of characters the movie introduces, each one is incredibly well-developed and strikingly human (or, at least, human-spider hybrid). They wrestle with everyday dilemmas such as loneliness, insecurity in friendships, misunderstandings, and complicated parent-child relationships. What’s more, each character’s individuality is furthered by their animation style.
The film experiments with a variety of styles across the vast miscellany of Spider-men it introduces (one scene included a stop-motion lego Spider-Man, constructed by a 14-year-old animator), but a few in particular stand out.
One is Gwen Stacy, or Spider-Woman, a fan-favorite character introduced in the film’s prequel. In Across the Spider-Verse, the audience experiences a deeper dive into Gwen’s backstory and the dimension she originates from. Her scenes are affected with a watercolor-esque quality, beautifully making use of color and values in what the producers call a “mood ring” of her emotions. We witness her struggle with her father, who she perceives to not accept her identity, primarily through the hues of the scenes. Her character and surroundings are shadowed in dark blues and purples that evolve into brighter tones as her relationship with her father improves over the course of the film. The use of color as a kaleidoscopic insight into her character’s development is another feature that elevates this cinematic masterpiece.
Another character incredibly elevated by the animation is new player Hobie Brown, or Spider-Punk; a rule-breaking anarchist Spider-Man with a Cockney accent whose animation style directly imitates his character. In their interview with discussingfilm.net, the film’s directors explained how his animation style borrows from experimental punk rock poster style, incorporating a cut-and-paste or almost scrapbookish quality that creates a visual dynamism as he serves as an advocate for rebellion in Miles’ struggle against the authority figures of the Spider-Verse. One of the most interesting qualities of his character is that his body actually moves at a different frame rate than his jacket - another example of Spider-Punk’s lingering defiance of the conventional. This technique is a callback to the first film of the series, showcased when Miles Morales is first grappling with his newly acquired spider-powers. His character started out his superhero training animated at 12 frames per second, while the world around him moved at 24 frames per second. As he got a better handle on his powers and accepted his role as Spider-Man, his frame rate gradually caught up to the world around him, mirroring his newfound confidence.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a fun movie. It is visually exciting, action-packed and guaranteed to make you laugh. It also knows when to pause the cacophony of web-slinging and dimension-traveling sequences for a heartfelt moment between two characters. The film’s ability to walk the line between genres, universes, and animation styles is what makes it so powerful, and holds significant promise not only for the final movie in the trilogy, but for the future of superhero and animated movies alike. Go witness it today: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is in theaters now.