There's a vibrance, a lightness that's just not possible with live action. Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman for Sony Pictures Animation, it's full of bold colors that make it look like a comic book drawn in 3-D or spray-painted on the side of a subway car. And by being an animated film, it gets to paint his world in a million and one different ways that feel far more vibrant than any CGI-enhanced Green Goblin.Īnd really, the animation-itself a throwback to the many non-film incarnations of the character-is astounding. No one did.) By featuring a new Spidey, it gets to introduce audiences to an artistic Brooklyn kid trying to fit in at a school for gifted students instead of the same Queens-bred photographer they've seen so many times before. ( Spider-Man: Homecoming may be a delight, but I never once wondered where it was going.
The punchline, if it can be called that, is that by introducing so many Spideys rather than just re-introducing the old one, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has made its titular character(s) far more compelling than they have been in years-and made a far, far better movie in the process. It's a whirlwind, one that gets more ridiculously funny as each time a new Spidey shows up and launches into their own "I was bitten by a radioactive spider…" story.īut that's just the setup. In this movie, Morales is the hero, and all the other Spideys out there-Spider-Gwen, Spider-Ham, Spider-Man Noir, Peni Parker-come into his world from another part of the multiverse thanks to the machinations of Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) and Doc Ock (Kathryn Hahn). That doesn't mean that Peter Parker doesn't exist in this version he just lands in the movie from another dimension. Spearheaded by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the duo that managed to wring actual hilarity out of both 21 Jump Street and Legos, Into the Spider-Verse removes Peter Parker as the focus of the story and instead offers up Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), the Afro-Latino teenager who became Spider-Man in the Marvel comics in 2011.