The Best Spider-Man Movie Ever Made: and Sony's All-Time Best Animation!

Rating: 10/10 (13 December 2018)

***(Spoilers Ahead)***
Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is so much better than anyone expected it to be: it's the kind of film people don't realize they want so badly, and when it comes, it's a breath of fresh creative air. This film's the best kind of crazy: alternate dimensions, cartoony-drama (family issues and dying mentors) mixed with humour (cartoon pigs, film-noir cliches and Japanese mechas), culturally remixing Spider-Man into a living and breathing idea; anyone can be him, and what makes them different defines their own Spider-Man.
Spider-Man is still one of my all-time favourite characters: he's tied with Batman and Superman as far as I'm concerned, and it was high time that Spider-Man got his own theatrically released animated feature. Spider-Verse honours the character and then some with its wholly unique animation style, its star-studded voice-actors and the whole thing feeling like the sort of thing Stan Lee would have wanted to see on the big screen. Stan unfortunately passed away before the film's release, so hopefully he got to see an early screener copy of the film. Who knows? It sucks that he's gone now; but his creations (his brain children) live on through the endless stream that is modern pop-culture. This movie's definitely a zeitgeist piece for Spider-Man: a self-aware love-letter to a character whom both comic and non-comic fans know and love openly.
This film delves into the origin story of Miles Morales: and how he became Spider-Man after Peter Parker is killed by Wilson Fisk (The Kingpin). We see Miles' dilemma of being himself play throughout the movie, and when the Spider-Men from the multiverse come into his reality, they help overcome his deep-inhibitions. This movie doesn't gloss over the dramatic stuff easily (Kingpin's family die in a car-crash) and it somehow manages to balance out the humour with the serious stuff ridiculously well (Spider-Ham and Spider-Gwen compliment the comedy-drama duality of the film). Spider-Verse is the comic book movie people have wanted since Frank Miller's Sin City: it's got that same to-the-T comic-book styling to it; and I don't say that lightly at all. It's something amazing to behold on the big screen.
If only animated cinema in general could acknowledge that it's okay to be as aesthetically liberal with animation as people can (and do) go with live-action cinema through endless variations of stories, genres, styles and motifs. I think movies like Spider-Verse show that Disney's animated fairy-tales (while still being very enjoyable) don't represent what animation CAN be like Japanese animation does, but films like Into The Spider-Verse represent what animation inevitably WILL be: a varied landscape as diversified as any medium in life can possibly get. The 2010s have been a rather progressive time for American animation and I'm more than happy to see Hollywood tackle things outside the 'Disney fairy-tale comfort zone'.
I loved every second of this movie and I'm stoked for the sequels and spin-offs! This movie was a SUPER-BLAST!
P.S. Stan Lee, Steve Ditko: you both made the world a happier place to be thanks to your genius creation.