It seems today that people can’t stop talking about the award-winning “Spider-man: Into The Spider-Verse,” and for good reason. Whether talking about the animation, art style, writing, or iconic characters of the film, ‘Spider-Verse’ blew away expectations in every aspect possible. Thanks to the remarkable team working behind the scenes, the film achieves the feel of what an adaptation should feel like: a living, breathing comic book.
The main story of “Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse” focuses on Miles Morales, a Puerto-Rican American kid living in the Bronx who is bitten by a radioactive spider in a New York subway. He later stumbles upon the film’s main villain Kingpin trying to open a portal to another dimension.
Though Kingpin succeeds in this, something drastic happens to the Peter Parker of Miles’ dimension and Miles has to take up the mantle of Spider-man. Miles must work with other “Spider-people” from other parallel dimensions in order to stop Kingpin and send the other Spider-people back to their dimensions in the process.
While the story may seem confusing in this short of a synopsis, ‘Spider-Verse’ excels in keeping the viewer up to speed through fantastic pacing and writing. The action of the movie starts nearly immediately by giving a quick brush-over of Spider-Man’s general origin story, showing off the movie’s great pacing right off the bat. Every moment of the movie seems to progress completely naturally, to the point where transitioning from one beat to the next is completely seamless. This is aided by incredible voice talent, including Shameik Moore as Miles, Nicolas Cage as the always-grayscale Spider-Noir and even John Mulaney as the hilarious Spider-Ham (a pig bitten by a radioactive spider that plays as almost a parody of Spider-Man in general). Each shows their personality in every line that they utter and every frame of the movie’s astounding animation.
The art style and animation of this movie are unlike anything ever released before it. Though it takes a bit to get used to, the extremely dynamic camera movements make the action hit just that much harder. It quite honestly feels like watching a comic book coming to life thanks to the animation intentionally being done in a lower frame rate to replicate traditional 2D animation.
The charming style even varies from character to character, with each one having slightly different art styles to correspond to their relative dimensions. However, this also leads to frequent use of sudden frames of solid color to help make hits heavier, so one should keep that in mind when going to view this movie, especially if they have photosensitive epilepsy.
In short, “Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse” is not only one of the best Spider-Man movies ever made, but also one of the best superhero movies ever made. The film had such charm, fantastic writing and amazing visuals that it will leave anyone who sees it wanting more. This is a fantastic film for Spider-Man fans and casual viewers alike, and completely deserves every award it has won thus far. “Spider-Verse” is truly a triumph for modern animated films, and hopefully will drive studios to make more films that stand out as much as this one.
