Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
2023 · Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson, Joaquim Dos Santos
After reuniting with Gwen Stacy, Brooklyn’s full-time, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is catapulted across the Multiverse, where he encounters the Spider Society, a team of Spider-People charged with protecting the Multiverse's very existence. But when the heroes clash on how to handle a new threat, Miles finds himself pitted against the other Spiders and must set out on his own to save those he loves most.
dir. Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson, Joaquim Dos Santos · 2023
The rare sequel that treats its predecessor's revolution as a floor, not a ceiling. Miles Morales is pulled out of Brooklyn and into a sprawl of parallel worlds, each rendered in its own idiom — Gwen Stacy's universe washes itself in watercolor that bleeds with her moods, Mumbattan crackles like hand-inked comics pages, and one antagonist looks torn from a ballpoint sketchbook, unfinished lines quivering. Directors Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson, and Joaquim Dos Santos coordinate hundreds of artists across what amounts to a half-dozen incompatible aesthetics inside single frames, and the miracle is that the emotional throughline — a teenager insisting on authoring his own story against an institution that calls his life a fixed narrative — never gets lost in the spectacle. It is also, unapologetically, half a film, ending mid-breath in the tradition of The Empire Strikes Back. The canon-versus-anomaly conflict doubles as the movie's own artistic manifesto: the belief that a story can break its prescribed pattern and survive.
Lines of influence
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) — Established the entire pipeline the sequel extends: printed-comic Ben-Day/halftone dots, deliberate chromatic-aberration mis-registration, hand-inked contour lines, and characters animated 'on twos/threes' at split frame-rates to read as illustration rather than smooth CG.
- The Empire Strikes Back (1980) — The middle-chapter template it explicitly cites: a darker second act that fractures the ensemble, delivers a hero-crushing revelation, and ends on an unresolved cliffhanger rather than a self-contained arc.
- The LEGO Movie (2014) — Lord & Miller's authorial signature — CG engineered to counterfeit a physical medium (brick stop-motion) plus a meta, self-referential narration about who controls the story — is the DNA of Spider-Verse's medium-mimicry and its 'author your own canon' thesis.
- Paperman (2012) — Pioneered the Meander hybrid of expressive hand-drawn 2D lines layered over 3D CG geometry, the exact 'ink-line on a dimensional model' problem Spider-Verse solved at feature scale.
- Loving Vincent (2017) — Renders every frame as a visible brushed painting, treating painterly texture and stroke as the animation's core language — the same conviction behind Gwen's dissolving watercolor world.
- Yellow Submarine (1968) — Early proof that a single film can weld incompatible visual idioms — pop-art collage, rotoscope, flat graphic cutouts — into one heterogeneous composited space, the principle Spider-Verse pushes to per-character rendering styles.
- Speed Racer (2008) — Translated comic-book grammar to the screen with layered multi-plane compositing, split-panel simultaneity, and wipe transitions that behave like turning a comics page — a live-action rehearsal for Spider-Verse's panel logic.
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) — Embeds native comics devices — onomatopoeia lettering, gutter panels, and graphic sound-effect overlays — directly into the live-action frame as diegetic visual language, the same fusion of print and motion Spider-Verse formalizes.
- Sin City (2005) — Reproduces a graphic novel's ink-black high-contrast panels and spot-color literally, insisting the source's drawn aesthetic survive intact on screen rather than being naturalized.
- Arcane (2021) — Hand-paints texture and brushwork directly onto 3D models so CG reads as moving illustration, and stages editing as multi-artist authored surface — the painterly-over-dimensional approach Spider-Verse shares.
- The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) — From the same Lord/Miller–Sony Imageworks lineage, it overlays hand-drawn doodles, emoji, and sketch glyphs onto CG characters as expressive 2D annotation on a 3D base.
- Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) — Builds a multiverse where each parallel world carries its own visual register and montage rhythm, using rapid heterogeneous cutting between idioms to dramatize identity and self-authorship.
- Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) — Directly adopts Spider-Verse's toolkit — reduced/variable frame rate, visible ink outlines, and painterly storybook brushstrokes over CG — to break DreamWorks house realism into stylized illustration.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) — Extends the ballpoint-sketch idiom Spider-Verse used for Miles's world into a whole film, rendering everything in visible pencil hatching and teenage-notebook doodle texture with fingerprint smudges left in.
- A-ha: Take On Me (1985) — The foundational pencil-sketch/rotoscope aesthetic — animated graphite line-art intercut and morphing with photographed reality — that Spider-Verse revives for its ballpoint and unfinished-drawing characters like The Spot.
- Klaus (2019) — Reintroduced volumetric painted lighting and shadow onto hand-drawn 2D so flat animation gains dimensional form, the inverse-direction experiment (depth into 2D) that parallels Spider-Verse's illustration-into-3D.