“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
2018 • PG • 1h 57mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
You’re reading Pizza & a Movie—rewinding the stories of rental classics. Tonight we’re slingin’ a web back a mere five years to see how it all began before the sequel hits theaters next week. Untie your Jordans, it’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Here’s the plot. Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) lives in Brooklyn with is protective mom (Luna Lauren Vélez) and by-the-book cop dad (Brian Tyree Henry) but commutes to a fancy school prep school across town. It’s a big opportunity, but makes Miles not quite belong in either neighborhood. He works out the tension through street art. Less strait-laced Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali) takes him to a spot down in the subway tunnels away from prying eyes to spray paint his masterpiece. You’ll never see it coming, but: plot twist! Out of the blue here comes a radioactive spider to bite Miles, conferring unspecified “Spider” powers to this unsuspecting young “-Man”. It’s crazy. I don’t know how they come up with this stuff.
Back at school, Miles isn’t adjusting gracefully to his new metaphor for puberty, oops, I mean powers. His sticky Spidey-fingers result in transfer student Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) getting a new haircut and grudge. Miles ventures back through the underground tunnels, discovering a collider built by big biz bad-boy Wilson Fisk (Liev Schreiber), known to the underworld as Kingpin. After watching Spider-Man (Chris Pine) get his ticket punched trying to disable Kingpin’s collider, Miles becomes the guardian of a USB drive that could save the day. It looks like there’s a new Spider-Man in town, and it’s him. But soon a lumpier Spidey, Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) from another universe, swings into frame to show Miles the ropes (webs?). And it seems Gwen from school is Spider-Gwen, from yet another dimension. Together with even more Spiderfolks, can they stop Kingpin and his collider from tearing the world apart? And will Miles get the hang of his puberty, aw rats, did it again—powers? And I’m just spitballing here, and the answer’s probably no, but could someone be a small pig? I would love that.
Where You Know That Voice From
Shameik Moore (Miles): Dope (’15)
Jake Johnson (Peter B. Parker): New Girl (’11-’18)
Hailee Steinfeld (Spider-Gwen): True Grit (’10)
Mahershala Ali (Uncle Aaron): House of Cards (’13-’16)
Brian Tyree Henry (Miles’ Dad): Atlanta (’16-’22)
Luna Lauren Vélez (Miles’ Mom): Dexter (’06-’12)
Lily Tomlin (Aunt May): 9 to 5 (’80)
John Mulaney (Spider-Ham): Various stand-up specials
Kimiko Glenn (Peni Parker): Orange Is the New Black (’14-’19)
Nicolas Cage (Spider-Man Noir): The Rock (’96), Con Air (’97), Face/Off (’97)
Kathryn Hahn (Doc Ock): Glass Onion (’22)
Liev Schreiber (Kingpin): Ray Donovan (’13-’20)
So how’d we get this Spider-Man? Rewind the clock to 2014. Creative team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were school chums from Dartmouth. They were animation guys, both drawing comics in the school paper. A few years on, they’d made Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 and 22 Jump Street and The Lego Movie together. When Sony approached them about making a Spider-Man flick, they said yes. But only if they could do something truly different.
To me, transcendent movies have three things. Great look, great story, great characters. When combined, they build compelling themes, like Inception. Or universal emotions, like Toy Story. Or teleport you to other worlds, like Star Wars.
Spider-Verse has all three ingredients. The characters you know. The plot you’ve heard. But the look, oh baby, the look. Let’s sink our teeth into that.
Why does it look like this? The visuals come from three places. First, Spider-Verse’s unique aesthetic comes from its source material. The animation team drew on style from comic book artists like Miles Morales co-creator Sara Pichelli. The Miles we see in this movie looks very similar to hers. Moves like hers, acts like hers. But halftone dots, Spidey-sense squiggles, written-out onomatopoeias—all that’s straight off the comic book page.
That’s exactly how Lord and Miller wanted it. Said they wanted watching their Spider-Man to feel like you “walked inside a comic book”. I gotta think they were after the raison d’être. Why does this movie need to be made? The multiverse! Right, settle down, bud. Miles! Yep, he’s a charmer, naturally. But maybe most of all? You’ve never, ever, ever seen Spider-Man look like this before. Spider-Verse would deliver what no live-action feature could. It would actually look like the comic books fan loved.
So they had the visuals. And the vision. Now they needed the folks who could make it happen. Sony Pictures Animation uses Sony division Sony Pictures Imageworks like Disney uses Pixar. They do all Sony’s animated movies. But—and this is way cooler—they did the effects for every prior Spider-Man movie. All of ‘em! The look of web-slinging? Figured it out already. How to build a New York panorama? Sorted. That distinctive Spidey pacing? Nailed. Down. But Spider-Verse? That was a whole different ballgame.
If you make an animated movie, you’ll work on it for years. An average Pixar movie gestates for seven years. That’s a lot of lifetime. So the end result better be something memorable, not just another kid-pleaser tossed into the streaming meat grinder. But there’s no shortcut. No cheat code. The hard way is the only way.
Spider-Verse Picks the Hard Way
It took a year just to get ten seconds of the right look at the beginning.
Each character has a distinctive art style and design, like making five movies instead of just one.
3D animators rendered each frame, then 2D animators painted elements like brush strokes and halftones on top.
Up to 177 animators at one point worked on the production instead of farming the work out.
Instead of using blur for motion and depth of field effects, everything is crisp. Paint strokes, trailing duplicates, halftone overlays and simplification achieve perspective.
It’s a movie, but they didn’t do anything a comic book couldn’t do.
Normal animated movies are an hour and fifteen to thirty minutes. That’s because animation is really, really expensive. Few people do it. The only way to keep the cost affordable is to keep the running time short. So of course, Spider-Verse is long. A minute shy of two hours. And even the credits are animated! But get a load of this: the first version was even longer.
The initial rough animatic was over two hours long. Why? Lord and Miller approach their projects by throwing everything they can think of at them. The result is, of course, too much of everything. From there, they trim to find the plot, the hooks, the tone, all while figuring out how much is not quite too much. They’re asking, “How much can a movie like this hold?” If you’ve seen Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or The Lego Movie, you know their work can be fun, delirious endurance tests. I still remember how tired my brain was after seeing The Lego Movie in theaters. But shoot, if it works, it works.
Look. There’s a lot more to how they made this. Animating on ones versus twos (they did both). 25 frames per second for Spidey-fast speed, 12 per second for “crunchy” action. Motion smearing like an old Looney Toons cartoon. Insider and Wired cover it better in video than I could in words.
Insider on how Spider-Verse was animated
Wired on how animators created the Spider-Verse
Weirdly, the soundtrack is excellent too. All on its own. Didn’t need to be, but it is. It’s meant to be what Miles would have actually listened to. It’s his playlist. Which makes sense in-movie, because we first see him singing along with his headphones on. This album played in my car every time my kids got to pick the jams for about two years straight. I know it well. And it is a great soundtrack! Good on ya, Miles.
Did folks in ’18 like this? Everyone did. It opened 11 days before Christmas. A perfect weekend—nothing else good came out then. You could have seen Clint Eastwood vehicle The Mule or the steampunk flick no one wanted, Mortal Engines. Do you remember those movies? Of course not. No one does. People saw Spider-Verse to the tune of $35M on opening weekend alone. It went on to rake in $384M total (against a budget of $90M) over the following two and a half months, picking up an Oscar for Best Animated Picture in February along the way. It was an especially theatrical movie—looked amazing on the big screen. “You have to see this thing,” all your friends were saying.
Critics dug it too. Oliver Jones compared it to a Kubric classic, calling it “an LSD freak-out on par with 2001: A Space Odyssey”. For the Atlantic, David Sims (of Blank Check) pointed out that it did the impossible—“something new in the superhero genre”—which really is saying something. Tom Holland, who is not a critic but is instead a certified cutie pie who’s played Spider-Man in I-can’t-be-bothered-to-count-how-many Marvel entries, said it was “honestly one of the coolest films I’ve ever seen.” There was no criticism, merely shades of praise. If you were edgy, you gave it a measly three and a half stars out of four. It was a crowd-pleaser that managed to take non-stop risks too.
As for me? Spider-Man and I go way back. I read stacks of comics when I was a kid. But my favorite through all the years was Spider-Man. I watched the cartoon at 3:30pm after school clear through grade school. The Toby Maguire big-screen adaptation was the first DVD I ever owned. When Spider-Verse came out, I had to see it. I skived off work and grabbed tickets with my friend Christian. We both laughed until we cried at the line, “Can you imagine a seahorse seeing another seahorse and making it work?” I loved it so much I took my family to see it two days later.
It would go on to be my son’s favorite movie. The one he watched on every sick day for a year. He still borrows the Art of the Movie hardback from my office to pour over. My daughter wore her Spider-Gwen costume everywhere until she wore through the ballet flats feet. We’ve been looking forward to the sequel for a year and a half—the premier date kept getting bumped back. We’ll be there opening weekend. I already have tickets.
That’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Not part of a series, just a movie I loved so much I barely needed an excuse to dive back in. Thought it’d be good to get back up to speed together before Across the Spider-Verse drops. Smart, right? Good to stay on top of things. Responsible!
Next week we’ll start number one in a two-parter: AI at the Movies. First up is Her (her?), then Ex Machina the week after. Feels like the time to be covering AI as we are in the midst of what history will surely call Hot AI Summer.
And, hey, if this one spun your web, sling it on over to someone else who’d like it too! Spider-Man is for the people.
Notes
Spider-Verse does fan service so differently than Marvel flicks. Marvel winks at you, letting you know it knows you know what it’s doing when it drops a reference. This just puts easter eggs everywhere. It rewards rewatching, not just irony.
This is a case of folks making something a lot better than it needed to be. Often, those are the things we love.
John Mulaney also gives a scene-stealing vocal performance as Big Jack Horner in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which is very good and will make you cry a little but in a good way.
Stan Lee is a passenger in almost every train that goes by. All the animators wanted to do him, and everyone won.
Stan Lee died at age 95. They’d already recorded his cameo in this, making it his last voice performance.
This is a low-key art school movie. Color theory, animation techniques, perspective, mixed media, historical styles like Cubism, it’s all here.
Instead of hiding the artist’s hand like a Pixar film, Lord and Miller directed the animation team to make sure their work was evident in every frame.
Nic Cage considers his character to be a Humphrey Bogart homage.
Bibliography
‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ Is a Mind-Bending Joyride
The Story Behind The Animation Style Of ‘Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse’