Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman from a screenplay by Phil Lord and Rothman, arrived at a moment when the superhero film had become the dominant, and increasingly exhausted, form in popular cinema. Part of the audience is sated with the genre; still more are sated with Spider-Man specifically, a character whose screen saga had been rebooted twice inside a decade. Doing something fresh with him looked close to impossible. The film proves it is not, and it proves it chiefly by refusing to be a live-action Spider-Man film at all. Animation is not a compromise here but the enabling condition: it grants the filmmakers a freedom of style, scale and density that a $90 million live-action production could never risk.
That freedom announces itself immediately in the film's central impertinence. The Spider-Man of the title is not Peter Parker. Parker dies in the first act, killed by Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. The mask passes to Miles Morales, a Brooklyn teenager from a mixed-race family — his father a Black police officer, his mother Puerto Rican — who is bitten by a radioactive spider, gains powers he cannot yet use, and is dragged by circumstance into an identity he never asked for. A second Peter Parker, paunchy, cynical and dimensionally displaced, arrives as a reluctant mentor; Fisk's particle accelerator has punched a hole between realities, pulling in Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man Noir, Peni Parker and Spider-Ham along with him. The misfits unite to stop Fisk repeating his experiment and tearing the city apart.
The premise looks, on paper, like the fashionable concession to political correctness. It works because the film never treats Miles as a demographic gesture. He is written with specificity: the Spanish at the dinner table, the sticker-covered sketchbook, his uncle Aaron's graffiti and the "Sunflower" needle-drop that scores their first bonding. The thesis — anyone can wear the mask — is earned rather than announced, and the film's own references, to sixty years of comics and to the earlier live-action pictures, are handed to the veteran viewer as gifts rather than as homework.
Visually the film is genuinely extraordinary. Working with several hundred animators, the directors ransack the whole grammar of print: Ben-Day dots, Kirby krackle, misregistered colour plates, hand-lettered captions and thought balloons, line boil that makes every edge tremble. Miles, before his transformation, is animated on twos — twelve frames a second — so that he visibly lags behind the world, and the technique resolves into smooth twenty-four when he finally takes the leap of faith off a Queens rooftop. It is the most eloquent use of frame rate in mainstream animation since the silent era, and it is the film's emotional summit.
Yet the film is not flawless. The first act is frantic to the point of exhaustion: Miles's origin, his uncle's death, Peter's arrival and the team's assembly are crammed into forty minutes with barely a beat allowed to breathe. The supporting Spiders are thin — Spider-Ham and Noir are essentially running gags, and Gwen, the most interesting of them, is left half-drawn until the sequel. The multiverse functions partly as a merchandising mechanism, a machine for producing variant action figures. And the film's lesson is occasionally stated outright in dialogue where it might have been dramatised. That it survives these faults is a tribute to the craft, but the density is a fault all the same.
The Oscar for Best Animated Feature was deserved and overdue, and the film's box-office success — some $375 million worldwide — broke a long Pixar stranglehold on the category and on the medium's prestige. It also made sequels inevitable. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson, extended the visual vocabulary to something close to abstraction and made Gwen's grief its spine, but it split its story in half and ended on a cliffhanger that left audiences suspended. Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, the concluding part, has been pushed back repeatedly and is now slated for 2027 — a delay that has tested the goodwill the first film bought. Meanwhile the "Spider-Verse look" has been absorbed into advertising, title sequences and lesser animation, which is the surest sign of influence and the beginning of dilution.
What remains is a film of real wit, warmth and formal daring, one whose best sequences — the leap, the death of Aaron, the kaleidoscopic final collision — are as good as anything in modern American animation. Its weaknesses are the weaknesses of abundance. It is the rare blockbuster that could stand to be a little less.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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