Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

It is astonishing to me that it has taken this long for Hollywood to do a big screen animated take on Spider-Man.  Given his powers and abilities, it would seem only natural.  Animation, after all, has a freedom of movement and space that no other type of film can provide.  Now that I think about it, it kind of amazes me that animation is not used more often in the superhero genre.  Yes, we've had The Incredibles movies, and Big Hero 6, but that's about it recently.  And the only time one of the major comic book names has ever been animated on the big screen was way back in 1993, with the criminally underrated Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, which to this day remains my personal favorite movie about the character.  Superhero animation has mostly been reserved for the straight-to-DVD market, and I can't understand why.

One would think that animating these heroes would just be an obvious choice, yet they are mostly placed in live action.  Obviously, there's nothing wrong with that, and Marvel Studios has been doing a great job with handling their characters so far.  But Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (which is not a Marvel Studios production, despite it being based on one of their characters) creates the ultimate argument as to why the character should have been animated all along.  With the freedom of movement we see in this film, not only can the titular hero do anything a spider can, but he does so with with a tone that is consistently inventive and alive.  This movie sets itself apart from the handful of other comic book movies we get every year by being inventive in its visuals, storytelling, and truly using the art form to create images we have never seen, and could not be achieved in one of the live action Spidey movies. 

But it's not just on the surface that this movie works.  Behind the adventure, comedy and movement, there is substance underneath.  The movie asks what does it really mean to be Spider-Man?  Can anyone do it?  What does he mean to the people he protects?  Like the best superhero films, this is not all flashy spectacle and funny quips.  This can be a deeply moving film at times.  It's also just a lot of fun.  It has scenes of movement that I had never dreamed of before in the cinematic universe of the character.  When I saw Spider-Man leaping, crawling, or diving off a roof, only to catch himself with his webbing, it's how I always imagined him moving in the comics.  But more than being a thrilling story about the hero, it is also self-aware.  It knows that we have seen Spider-Man brought to the big screen numerous times in the past 16 years, and it knows it would have to do something new to bring the audience in.  And so directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, along with screenwriters Phil Lord (The Lego Movie) and Rothman, have given us a universe-bending story built around multiple dimensions that shows us that there is a lot more to the story to tell, and that this movie is only scratching the surface.

But before all that, we are introduced to Miles Morales (voice by Shameik Moore), a regular teen from Brooklyn who lives in a world where Spider-Man (Chris Pine) is not just a superhero, but a merchandising force of nature with Halloween costumes, frozen treats that look like him, and even a Christmas album.  Miles goes through a transformation when he is bitten by a radioactive spider, and finds himself with powers that are all at once exhilarating, terrifying, and embarrassing when he gets his sticky web hands stuck in the hair of a female classmate.  Viewers who have been with these movies since the very first back in 2002 know what is going on.  What they may not know is that in the world of the comic books, there are multiple universes, and Miles happens to run into an alternate version of Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), who is overweight, cynical and emotionally drained.  It's an interesting angle on the character that we have seen so many times, and Johnson brings a good mix of sarcastic humor and sadness to his performance.

And just how does Miles happen to run into this Parker who hails from a completely different universe and timeline?  This would be the result of the crime lord known as The Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) building a super collider with the aid of a gender-flipped Doctor Octopus (Kathryn Hahn), and tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time.  This allows various Spider-people from alternate universes to all come piling into Miles' world all at once.  These new faces include the acrobatic rock star Gwyn Stacy/Spider-Gwyn (Hailee Steinfeld), the gritty black and white Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage), the cute and bubbly Penni Parker (Kimiko Glenn), who uses a giant spider robot to aid her in her fight against crime, and most notably Spider-Ham (a scene-stealing John Mulaney), a cartoon pig from a Looney Tunes-style universe who got bitten by a radioactive spider, and now battles evil with the giant wooden mallet that he hides in his pocket.

The brilliance of using animation to tell this story is not just in the freedom of movement it gives to these characters, but also how the animators use different styles of animation to represent each of these different spider-beings.  Miles, Peter and Gwyn Stacy are depicted in a traditional CG human way, while the mysterious Spider-Noir is all hard edges and shadows.  Penni Parker, meanwhile, is depicted in an anime style, while Spider-Ham comes across as a lost Tex Avery creation.  It's the constant mixing of these different art styles, along with the film's overall tone of a living comic book world (we see comic-style captions appear when Miles is thinking to himself) that makes this so exhilarating to watch.  But behind all the spectacle and brilliant verbal and visual humor, the movie is a lot deeper than you might think.  We grow to care about Miles, and his relationship with the two main men in his life, his cop father (Brian Tyree Henry) and his uncle (Mahershala Ali).  This is the rare blockbuster that actually gives its characters room to grow and be emotional.  We also grow to care about the various Spider-people, and their plights to return to their home dimensions.  And when it is time for the big action sequences, they are some of the finest I have ever seen, even eclipsing some of the better live action efforts.  Even the climatic battle (usually the weakest link of a superhero movie) manages to impress, and has an amazing amount of flow considering how chaotic it gets.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is truly something special.  It can be enjoyed by just about anyone, even those with little knowledge of the characters, as the movie does a great job of setting up its complex, but fairly linear, plot.  It has also become my favorite cinematic interpretation of the character and his universe.  I hope the team behind this gets to do a lot more of these movies, but most of all, I hope it does well enough to inspire more like it, as there are plenty of other heroes who I would love to see get the animated big screen treatment.  To me, it just makes more sense to hire a talented voice actor to play Batman, than to hire a big name like Ben Affleck, and hide him behind a lot of rubber and latex.

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