[Spoiler-free]
I have seen the future of animation and it rocks! On Thursday, I dutifully shuffled down to my local Odeon to see Spider Man: Across the Spider-verse. There, I found myself in the busiest screening I’ve been to since before Covid, with possibly the most engaged audience as well, watching what I am confident it is the most compelling superhero film since at least Endgame and perhaps the best animated film since Inside Out.
It’s a bravura display. That’s most evident in how it looks. Its Oscar winning predecessor, Into the Spiderverse, was a milestone for innovation in animation. After decades of mainstream animated releases almost all being in or imitating Pixar’s house style, Into the Spider-verse was refreshingly new. Most notably using a kind of dot matrix colouring for parts of the screen both to differentiate the foreground and background and to evoke the feel of a comic book. Indeed, it constantly drew upon the visual grammar of comics to enliven itself: hand-drawn stills, 60’s Batman style pops, image captions, and more. This was not new per se. Ang Lee’s tried something similar in his 2003 Hulk film. But by doing it in animation, the Spider-verse team were able to both push it further and blend them in more naturally.
Showcasing a whole new style type of animation might seem like a difficult trick to repeat. To do so several times in the same film is essentially miraculous. However, each time we visit a new universe in Across the Spiderverse, their appearance is profoundly different. And they all look astonishing. From scenes that seem to be happening in a watercolour whose palette is constantly shifting to reflect the character’s emotions, to lovingly rendered recreations of the classic cartoons from the sixties, through to what any spider man film lives or dies by: the ability to get you to hold your breath for swings, jumps and drops. As you’ve probably guessed, not a film to wait to watch at home. The scale of its artistic ambition absolutely merits – nay deserves – a screen the size of a bus.
But its not just visual spectacle either. Despite being the tenth Spider man film in twenty years and the fourth multiverse film set in or around the MCU – not to mention following on the heels of a multiverse film sweeping last year’s Oscars – you don’t feel like you’ve seen this film before. Even though at a macro-level, the plot beats are probably what you would expect, they hardly ever come without a twist. Often that comes in the form of writers Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s madcap humour, which made films like Mitchells vs the Machines, 21 Jump Street, and the Lego Movie so enjoyable. In particular, they know how to make in-jokes about the wider Spider-mythology, which are funny if you know, but get swept away in the cavalcade of gags if you don’t. Other times, whilst still managing to follow a basic heroes’ journey narrative, Lord and Miller introduce enough detours, diversions and misdirections to keep the audience on their feet. Most fundamentally, however, this is a very human story. If I say that it takes a while for the main plot to really click in, that might seem like a criticism. It isn’t though, taking the time to reacquaint us with our hero and heroine and to absorb what are the personal stakes of this adventure for them, really increases the audience’s investment in the story.
That’s to say nothing of having:
- a stellar voice cast. Of the 18 cast members listed on IMDB between them have 3 Oscar wins plus 3 nominations.* Which is pretty remarkable for what at some level is a children’s cartoon.
- Daniel Pemberton providing a cracking score. He’s not a great film composer the way that say Hans Zimmer, Michael Giaccino or Hildur |Guðnadóttir are, producing fantastic pieces of music even if separated from the films they were written for. But you really are going to have to look very far to find someone so regularly writing scores as brash or as fun.
- Spider-rex
If I may remount a hobby horse, I’ve been riding since at least 2015, this does show, or rather show again, the fallacy of conflating the two meanings of “original” in the context of a film. A film can be original in the sense of displaying novelty and creativity. It can also be original in the sense of not drawing on pre-existing IP. Being the later does not guarantee the former. Nor as Across the Spider-verse shows, does the former require the later. We’ve swung along this path before, but never this way, nor as well till now.
*Mild spoilers:
Gwen Stacey (Hailee Steinfeld, Best Supporting Actress nominee 2011 for True Grit)
Miles’ dad (Bryan Tyree Henry, Best Supporting Actor nominee 2023 for Causeway)
Spider Punk (Daniel Kaluuya, Best Actor nominee 2018 for Get Out and winner 2021 for Judas and the Black Messiah)
The Prowler (Mahershala Ali, Best Actor winner 2017 for Greenbook and 2019 for Green Book)
Matter Of Facts 