Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
2018 · Bob Persichetti
A near-perfect crowd-pleaser: for family night, for cheering yourself up, for showing someone what animation can do. Pure comfort with real craft under it.
What it's about
Miles Morales is a Brooklyn teenager juggling a new school and a loving, complicated family when a radioactive spider bite hands him powers he never asked for. Then Kingpin's super collider tears holes between universes, and Spider-People from other worlds start dropping into his — leaving Miles, the least experienced of them all, to figure out what kind of hero he wants to be.
The experience
Exhilarating, funny, and unexpectedly moving — it snaps along with the rhythm of a great comic book but keeps circling back to a kid and his family. It's the rare superhero film that leaves you lighter than it found you.
Performances
Shameik Moore makes Miles instantly lovable, and Jake Johnson's washed-up, sweatpants-era Peter B. Parker is one of the great reluctant-mentor turns — funny and quietly sad in the same breath.
The craft
It invented a visual language from comic-book printing itself — Ben-Day dots, misaligned colors, thought balloons and panel borders invading the frame — and animates Miles at a different rhythm than the heroes he's measuring himself against, so his growth is something you can literally see. Produced under Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, with a script as nimble as the images.
Why it matters
It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and split American studio animation into before and after — the stylized, expressive look of countless films since traces straight back to it.
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.