A franchise on drugs

Rating: 6/10 (10 March 2019)

Most of us have dreams. Not the ones about having a billion bucks or getting that girl, but the night time ones. So most of us would agree that in that twilight zone our brain unleashes its creativity, no longer bound by the constraints of reality, and that allows us to dream the most crazy and amazing stuff. And most bizarre and incoherent also. Especially if there were some substances consumed beforehand.
In that sense, I'd agree with those who say that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animation film we could dream for. I'm far from the comic book culture, but even I can admire the visual style of this film, made so that any still out of it could actually pass for a real comic book's frame. That aesthetics is brilliantly done, no questions about it.
The rest of admiration, however, heavily depends on how much you are into TV cartoons, comic books and Spider-Man himself. This film loves to reiterate over and over again that it's based on an established universe, so there's an abundance of Spider-Man movie references and other allusions. If such things make you gasp in awe and maybe even shed a tear of nostalgic affection, you'll love it all. But for me as a non-Spider-man-acolyte, this soon became somewhat boring. I wanted to see something new, something unexpected.
And something new I did receive! In the form of a slapstick action multiplied by the pseudo-scientific stuff as grotesquely absurd as it was far-fetched. And I can clearly see how Sony was inspired by the likes of Big Hero 6 and its outright fusion of the Western and Eastern kid entertainment culture, and of Ant-man and even Dr. Strange and their abundance of moving colored specks and nonsensical words in lieu of common sense. The deeper we go into the Spider-Verse, the more bizarre it looks, feels and acts, until we're forced to accept that there are no rules anymore to cling to and that pigs can indeed fly, just as trains.
I do appreciate bringing a new stylistic vision into the world of full feature animation. But I can't say as much about bringing a popcorn bucket of LSD along with it, turning everything into a final battle from Final Fantasy, with its constant sparkle and rush and a muffled feeling that it used to mean something, but now you can't remember what exactly and it's way too late to stop and think about it.
It was a fascinating trip while it lasted, but praising it as something more than that would be like retelling your dreams to someone else: you'd end up realizing how little sense your words make and feeling embarrassed about the whole idea.