An Excellently Timed and Executed Spider-Man Movie

Rating: 8/10 (17 January 2019)

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse is without a doubt one of the greatest movies of 2018 - and also the freshest and coolest film of the year. As they say: with great love for comic-book origins, comes a great Spider-Man movie. Or somewhere along those lines. Anyhow, the point is, in this criminally undervalued gem of an animation, we can plainly see an undisguised appreciation for the comics and the classic components that comprise the world of Spider-Man. Or worlds. It's no secret that Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, while honing in on the heroic progression of alternate Spider-Man Miles Morales, brings together a number of universes, in which exist different versions of all the characters present in the one we know. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the brains behind The LEGO Movie and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, have here worked with the three directors (quite unusual in itself) to craft a very unique and unequivocally original take on popular stories stemming from late creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (who are saluted by a special credit at the end of the film), tied together by a ground-breaking animation style which hearkens back powerfully to the comic books from where it originated.
First, a word on the fashion of animation used to bring us Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. According to some sources, the process for developing the delightfully artistic look of the film commenced with roughly a year-long collaboration of the directors with a single animator, establishing the desired aesthetic. In the course of a second year, ten satisfactory seconds of animation were delivered by the production team, from which the rest of animation found its identity and consequently went into a good three years of production, during which the animation crew increased from 60 to 142 by August 2018 - the largest animation team ever assembled at Sony Picture Imageworks for a film. A new technique was used for the production of the movie, incorporating 2D and 3D components, forgoing or adapting industry standards like motion-blur and depth of field, and basing itself on a variable frame rate system. To quote Thrillist, who puts it better than I could: "The process was so intense that it took about a week and a half to make just two seconds of screen time. Luckily, they built the animation "on twos," which means a new image every second frame, instead of an image every single frame, which gives the movie a jerky, flip-book look that may take a minute to get used to."
Factors such as these produce something entirely unlike the blanket animation style most audiences are used to from the likes of Pixar and Disney films. Pause on any given frame, and chances are it'll be worthy of hanging on your wall. Co-director Peter Ramsey says he "(doesn't) know that there's a frame of (the) movie that didn't somehow get touched in some way, shape or form". In other words, every frame is a work of art. The splashes of dots denoting shades of colour give the impression of the "printed look". Speech bubbles pop up at unexpected moments, and action is sometimes interspersed with frames of classic, hand-drawn, comic-book illustrations, and all this fuels the sum feel of the piece, altering it drastically from standard cinema fare.
The story is just as simple as it ought to be, with the focus on the characters taking centre stage. Without advocating a political agenda, diversity is fine (non-forced diversity), and the movie mostly does a fine job of featuring an African-American character without feeling contrived, which is cool. My only qualms with this are some references nearer the start of the film, when I began to fear the worst for the movie's eventual outcome. However, if I did catch any progressive nonsense there, it was slight, and didn't detract very much from the overall product. Similar stereotypical circumstances like the recurrent believe-in-yourself phrase and the son-who-can't-get-on-with-his-father trope were minorly irritating, if only for having been central supports for so many storylines before it. The relationship that develops between the two becomes something that is personally far more hard-hitting, crescendoing to an emotional high later in the film, which is a subject I'll say no more on for risk of spoiling it! A line about a leap of faith provides a nice alternative to more familiar catch-phrases. Generally, the story allows for plenty of character development, particularly for our main star, Miles Morales, and a couple of supporting characters. It's a simple plot, and that benefits and compliments everything else nicely. In fact, there is so much material to mine, I sincerely hope the sequel will carry on and explore the intriguing possibilities this first instalment began. Some of those intricacies were perhaps a little unrealised, in my opinion, and certainly some characters were sidelined by reason of the modest run-time and the priority of the story; so a sequel is hardly an overload. More than anything, the movie is just a really fun ride, and non-essential details and complications are discouraged from encroaching on simple, super effective storytelling.
And a note on the music. Besides a lovely and fitting score, the movie utilizes for a variety of effects a vast collection of rap, which lends the whole piece a slick if modern mood that may discourage some viewers. The music does at times push out the deeper feelings the audience may otherwise experience with greater potency through the use of a more sentimental score, but most of the time it blends well with the activites ocurring on-screen. In closing, this is a movie I decided rather late in the game to patronize, as I love supporting clever, original cinema, and this particular Sony (of all people?) animation, despite being yet another superhero movie, is a wonder to behold, dispelling any doubt in my mind over the care and creativity of the artists behind it. It reinvents classic concepts and represents them in a completely unique story that is instantly memorable and special. The zany CGI animation gives free reign to the crazier side of comic-book life, enabling the movie to use designs deemed unacceptable or unviable in live-action entertainment and endowing it with a sense of randomness and delightful flippancy - the same and yet different from what has come before it. Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse is a delicious dedication to creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, emulating their comic books perfectly and establishing itself as one of the greatest movies of 2018, and one of the weirdest and coolest movies ever.