A Truly Amazing Spider-Man
What seemed like an apparent cash-grab on the part of Sony Pictures—making an animated Spider-Man film to provide their own web of Spider-Films (and Spider-Revenue) outside of their deal for live-action Peter Parker in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe—has actually resulted in the best animated film of 2018, the best Spider-man film since 2004’s Spider-Man 2, and the best, most original superhero film in many years.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse follows the journey of Miles Morales, a young, mixed-race student in Brooklyn who gets bitten by a radioactive spider, and, well, you probably know the rest. Spider-Verse hails from directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, who co-wrote the script with Phil Lord—also a producer here with his creative partner Christopher Miller (Lord and Miller are the creatives behind The Lego Movie, the Jump Street films, and about 30% of Solo: A Star Wars Story). These filmmakers understand that audiences know Spider-Man and his story; after all, we’ve had six Spider-Man standalone films, two of which recapped his origin. Peter Parker is very much a part of this story, but there’s no time wasted on telling us what we already know about him, and a good deal of the film’s humor is rooted in what the audience brings to yet another Spider story. Spider-Verse actually features seven Spider-Persons, ranging from Peter (Jake Johnson) and Miles (Shameik Moore) to Gwen Stacey (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage) and Spider-Ham (John Mulaney). It’s all explained as a collision of multiple dimensions due to the actions of crime lord Kingpin (Liev Schreiber).
What’s so impressive beyond the sly approach to making Spider-Man feel new again is that this story is still firmly that of a young man named Miles figuring out his place in the world. Miles already feels out of place in his new school, and his entry into this league of Spider-Folk is an extension of that emotional journey, as is his fraught relationship with his father (Brian Tyree Henry), a policeman who doesn’t trust Spider-Man. Put simply, everything in this film serves the story, not just the plot, and that’s refreshing for a superhero movie. Not even the villains feel extraneous or flat.
Beyond the phenomenal story of Spider-Verse, what makes it the best animated film of the year is its truly breathtaking execution as a work of animation. Pixar regularly makes animated films that are gorgeous to look at, and often seem unbelievably real, but when did you last see an animated film that felt wholly unique in its vision? That’s what the filmmaker deliver here, with a film that is perhaps the first comic book movie to really simulate the experience of a comic book come to life. Though three-dimensional, the characters and world are stylized to look flat, as though they were on a page, and their movements aren’t completely smooth, as if created by a flip-book of several sketches. It’s a computer animated film that feels hand-drawn on paper and yet wholly created on computers.
Spider-Man is my favorite superhero, because there’s an undeniably grounded quality to his story. He’s just a kid from Queens (or Brooklyn) trying to make his way in the world. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse makes Peter Parker, Miles Morales and the rest less alone, but just as unique as they’ve always been. At it’s core, it’s a film that’s telling us we can be superheroes too, we just have to figure out how to do it in our own way. You and I can’t be Peter or Miles, but we could be Spider-Man. What a marvel for a superhero movie to make that idea feel fresh again.