Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
2018 · Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
Struggling to find his place in the world while juggling school and family, Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales is unexpectedly bitten by a radioactive spider and develops unfathomable powers just like the one and only Spider-Man. While wrestling with the implications of his new abilities, Miles discovers a super collider created by the madman Wilson "Kingpin" Fisk, causing others from across the Spider-Verse to be inadvertently transported to his dimension.
dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman · 2018
American studio animation divides into before and after this film. Produced under the gleefully irreverent eye of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, it introduced Miles Morales — an Afro-Latino kid from Brooklyn — to moviegoing audiences by inventing a visual language worthy of him: Ben-Day dots and CMYK misregistration lifted from cheap newsprint, thought balloons and panel borders invading the frame, characters animated 'on twos' so their movement carries the staccato snap of a flipped comic. What could have been gimmickry becomes expressive grammar; Miles literally moves at a different frame rate than the hero he's measuring himself against, until he doesn't. The screenplay is equally nimble, wringing genuine pathos from the multiverse premise years before it curdled into franchise boilerplate. It took the Animated Feature Oscar away from Pixar and Disney, and within five years its fingerprints — mixed media, painterly stylization, the death of house-style realism — were visible everywhere from Puss in Boots to TMNT. A whole industry saw what animation could be and scrambled to catch up.
Lines of influence
- Hulk (2003) — Pioneered live-action comic-panel multiplicity — split-screen inset frames, panels that slide and shatter across the composite image — the same in-camera page-grammar Spider-Verse revives as overlaid staging panels.
- Speed Racer (2008) — Established the hyper-saturated, candy-flat pop-art plane compositing with layered foreground/background sliding and comic wipe transitions that Spider-Verse translates into CMYK color blocking.
- Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950) — UPA's limited-animation doctrine — deliberately holding frames, animating on twos and threes as an expressive choice rather than a cost — is the historical root of Spider-Verse's variable-frame-rate 'stepped' motion.
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009) — Lord and Miller's first feature codified their squash-heavy cartoon staging and gag-dense elastic timing — the authorial sensibility they later imposed on Spider-Verse as producers.
- Paperman (2012) — Disney's Meander tool fused hand-drawn expressive line over CG models, proving 2D linework could ride a 3D rig — the precise hybrid Spider-Verse scales up with hand-painted ink lines and stippling on CG characters.
- The Peanuts Movie (2015) — Rendered CG deliberately to read as flat 2D — snap-posing, on-twos motion and drawn detail lines held on the face — an immediate proof-of-concept for CG that rejects photoreal house-style smoothness.
- Akira (1988) — Anime's kinetic vocabulary — speed lines, motion smears, impact frames and held dramatic poses — supplies the emphasis-editing grammar Spider-Verse borrows for its action beats and onomatopoeia titles.
- The Lego Movie (2014) — Lord and Miller forced CG to emulate a tactile handmade medium (chunky stop-motion cadence, real-brick constraints), the same 'make the digital look built-by-hand' impulse that drives Spider-Verse's misregistration and dot-screen texture.
- Loving Vincent (2017) — Foregrounded visible brushwork and painterly surface as the animation's whole point — a contemporary declaration, alongside Spider-Verse, that the mark-making itself can be the aesthetic, not hidden under realism.
- Klaus (2019) — Layered volumetric hand-painted lighting onto traditional 2D drawings to fake dimensionality, a parallel-year rebellion against flat digital realism that shares Spider-Verse's 'painterly texture over form' ambition.
- Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) — Directly adopted Spider-Verse's variable frame rate — dropping heroes to animating-on-twos for storybook-illustration snap — plus visible brush-stroke backgrounds and bold ink outlines.
- The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) — From the same Lord/Miller producing team, it layers 2D doodle overlays — sparkle emoji, hand-drawn hearts and scribbles — directly onto the CG frame, extending Spider-Verse's comic-annotation compositing.
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) — Escalates the original's premise by giving each universe a wholly distinct rendering language — watercolor bleed for Gwen, Ben-Day-dot flatness for Mumbattan — pushing per-character art-style compositing to its limit.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) — Extends the death-of-house-style ethos into a teenage-sketchbook aesthetic — visible pencil crosshatching, ballpoint scribble textures and deliberate wobble lines — treating the frame as a hand-drawn page like Spider-Verse's ink work.
- Nimona (2023) — Carries forward the stepped variable frame rate and graphic-novel flatness, staging emotional beats on held on-twos poses rather than the smooth interpolation of prior CG-feature convention.
- The Bad Guys (2022) — DreamWorks' post-Spider-Verse pivot to 2D-inflected CG — cel-shaded flat color, graphic linework and comic-panel speed-frame action — a studio-wide adoption of the stylization Spider-Verse legitimized.