Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse…
I saw it last night. I’m arguably unable to review it, but I tried. I’ve written about this game-changing film time and time again on here and my old, defunct blog. It exceeded all of my wild expectations…
I firmly believe Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is a modern animated masterpiece and a step forward for the medium, in this technologically-charged age.
For anyone who has not seen Into The Spider-Verse, please DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. There are HUGE SPOILERS throughout…
Weeks back, I asked “what are we to do?” Hollywood has found a way to make animated features that are essentially artificial live-action movies, if that makes any sense. Movies like the Lion King remake that’s coming out next year, movies like Disney’s remake of their animated Jungle Book, Gravity, Ready Player One, etc. The films being made by the big animation houses are hyper-realistic and textured to the hilt, the only thing that distinguishes them are the character designs and art direction. There have been some exceptions… Films like The Book of Life, The Peanuts Movie, and Captain Underpants. Few and far between…
Sony Pictures Animation threw a hat into that ring with Into The Spider-Verse. This is the closest a CG film has gotten to hand-drawn beauty and warmth, but doesn’t try to recreate that. CG will never have that, so instead it takes advantage of what CG offers and creates a distinct look. The endgoal of CG doesn’t have to be plasticky, near photoreal things. It’s the complete antithesis of what Pixar and DreamWorks established in the mid-to-late 90s. Spider-Verse‘s visuals are comic book illustration come to life. It’s animation at its very best, it’s not animation that’s trying to recreate real life or make things that look like they can be in our real world with us. I wasn’t looking at a photograph, for once…
It is perfect in the visual department.
via Vanity Fair
Oh, and it didn’t stop there. Given that this is about one Spider-Man meeting multiple Spider-People across different dimensions, the film’s visuals don’t stay put. Miles Morales’ universe visually resembles the world of another Peter Parker, but once we meet the others? Gwen Stacy’s world seems a little more stylized, in terms of the color and art direction. The brief glimpses of Spider-Man Noir’s 1930s setting looks like a stylized Great Depression-era noir movie, something Sin City could envy. Peni Parker’s sequences and world are American anime, through-and-through. Spider-Ham brings intense Golden Age cartoon vibes, particularly that of the Looney Tunes and Tex Avery works. It’s a lovely smorgasbord of visual styles, all in one rule-breaking mainstream CG film. Again, perfection.
Where else have you seen all of this in one mainstream animated feature made in the last 5-10 years? The animation, visuals, and art are married to the film’s massive and gleefully irreverent story.
Directors Peter Ramsey, Bob Perischetti, and Rodney Rothman stage this movie like no other. They and the animators know that animation’s limitlessness allows for dynamic action and cinematography that won’t fly in live-action, and do what several modern CG films haven’t done. They’ve created action and spectacle that stands tall against the best of live-action/CG’ed blockbusters, if not TOPS many of them.
The story? Oh-ho-hooo, the story.
How could a 117-minute film effortlessly manage to be a poignant Miles Morales origin story, a plot spanning multiple dimensions, the closest thing to a legitimate Sinister Six movie, the story of a washed up Peter Parker, a set-up for future movies, and a movie about SIX different Spider-People at once? All without any pacing issues or noticeable logic gaps? The trio directing team and the writers deserve some kind of medal for managing that. It is through and through engaging, even if we’ve seen so many origin stories in this current superhero movie wave. Miles’ set-up wasn’t all that different from what we’ve seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC movie universe, and other recent superhero films. The way it’s pulled off was what made this unique, even if you took away all the Spider-Verse stuff, it would probably still be a solid and fresh story about Miles Morales living up to Spider-Man. I also think the character’s background helps in this regard, and the irreverent, decidedly comic book-y storytelling. Action is portrayed through comic book words (thwip! boom!), Miles’ inner-thoughts dot the screen like text boxes, the frame goes haywire with visual pizazz in dramatic moments, such as the scene of Miles getting bit by the spider.
Into The Spider-Verse is a family-friendly animated feature that’s arguably much more for teenagers and adults, but one that never patronizes the kids in the audience. No awkwardly-delivered lines, the comedy does so well within the PG confines (no doubt thanks to Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Midas touch, with the help of director Rothman’s comedy background), it doesn’t resort to pointless dick jokes and farts to keep any parents in the audience interested. It’s like a great Disney film or a great Pixar film, it’s appropriate for most kids but it’s mainly aimed at the adult intellect. In parts, I wondered to myself, “A few more steps and this would’ve easily been a PG-13.” It’s not a watered down superhero story, the film is genuinely dark and even crushingly emotional in parts. There are no Infinity War-level stakes, but I was moved just the same. Peter Parker’s death in Miles’ universe was genuinely upsetting, as was the backstory of the dubious mentor Peter Parker that got pulled into Miles’ universe, even the villainous Kingpin’s motivations have some weight to them. Miles’ relationship with his deceptive uncle functions as a wonderful through line to what’s actually a family drama in many ways. Seeing 15-year-old Miles deliberately fail in a place he feels he wasn’t meant to be hit a bit too close to home.
This is a family movie done right, animated or otherwise. Kids will love it, but it’s very much for the adults, adults with or without young’uns. It’s not some fun comedy, it’s a film that’s really about something and it’s unique. We really need more of that in stateside animation.
That’s not to say that mainstream feature animation has been dry for over a decade. There were plenty of films made before this one that have moved me or excited me in many ways, a couple recent examples off the top of my head would be the likes of Incredibles 2, Isle of Dogs, Coco, Captain Underpants, Zootopia, Inside Out, Kubo and the Two Strings, How To Train Your Dragon 2, The Book of Life, and The Lego Movie. Really good stuff has been happening in animation, and I’ll be the first to not deny that. Even the material that I’m not really gung-ho about is still work, animators and writers still did their jobs, poured their collective all into those films. Even in a year like 2017, a year that I felt that was rather dire for feature animation, I still acknowledge that the films are full of hard work just the same, whether I or others like the results or not.
Spider-Verse excited me like no other. For the first time in a long while, I am genuinely excited about where feature animation could go. I’m not betting on feature animation becoming a better body of work post-Spidey, but if all goes right, Sony’s little movie could lead to some very great things. I’ve said this many times, other people have been saying it, but the time could be now. Feature animation could be having its UPA moment.
I previously talked about how Spider-Verse isn’t dissimilar to the cartoons that were made by the United Productions of America during the 1940s and 1950s. Coincidentally, their bold, borderline-iconoclastic shorts were distributed by this film’s distributor, Columbia Pictures.
Previously, I had also pointed out that the big studios began to imitate the UPA. The theatrical short cartoon was seeing something of a decline by the 1950s. Disney whittled down short cartoon production by 1953, the year the final theatrical Mickey Mouse short (until 1995’s Runaway Brain) debuted and the same year that the visually striking Ward Kimball-directed Adventures in Music cartoons (Melody and the more recognized Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom) were released. MGM completely shut down all cartoon production in 1957, including the hugely successful Tom and Jerry series. In their case, they had then realized that they made a massive mistake in doing that, and that by 1960 there was still a market for new short cartoons, so they soldiered on without their original crews (whether it was Hanna-Barbera’s team or Tex Avery’s) for a little while afterwards. Disney focused only full-length features and featurettes, the latter means films that are too long to be shorts and too short to be features. Even Disney’s features bore budgetary compromises by this point. The cartoon world was going low budget. Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies slowly declined through the ’60s until the final shorts came about at the end of the decade, Terrytoons and Famous Studios went defunct around the same time, Walter Lantz wrapped it up in the early ’70s.
The UPA made low-budget cartoons from the beginning, and their crew sought to work within those walls, creating some truly striking, risk-taking cartoons. It didn’t have to be just funny bunnies and circle-eared mice. Cartoons like Gerald McBoingBoing and Rooty Toot-Toot more than showed that.
The UPA even managed to make it into the 1960s, made a feature or two, and then that was it. I feel it’s quite telling that even back then, the animation industry slowly veered towards change. Supposedly, Ward Kimball’s advocacy of a more UPA-esque style at Disney was met with opposition. MGM seemed to fully embrace it, but perhaps for MGM, it was for budgetary reasons. Nonetheless, Hanna and Barbera’s team opted for more UPA-like backgrounds with that wave of Tom and Jerry cartoons. Compare this scene from Tom’s Photo Finish (released in 1957) to The Cat Concerto, produced roughly a decade earlier…
The early 1950s Disney animated features presented a new house style. For Walt, making feature-length films and not 70-minute pictures cobbled together from shorter segments was a massive gamble in the post-war years. A solution was found in the artwork of one Mary Blair, and thus Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan present a kind of Disney feature animation that’s lower budget but as beautiful and eye-popping as anything from the studio’s peak. Lady and the Tramp feels like an extension of what we saw in the shorts and package features segments, and is downright elegant. However, a feature done in the Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom style was probably going to be a no-go.
The closest we got to that in features from Walt-era Disney were Sleeping Beauty and One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and it’s been well-documented that Walt didn’t, shall we say, quite dig the look of the latter feature.
Sleeping Beauty and Dalmatians form a curious dichotomy. Both were released back-to-back, for starters. Sleeping Beauty was Walt and his studio’s attempt to make a feature with the ambition of the early films, while Dalmatians was the direct result of Sleeping Beauty‘s crushing box office performance. The team now had to work with what they had, and – to reference a more obscure Disney film – to find a way to do something with what they got. Dalmatians was put into production when Disney had laid off nearly 3/4 of its animation staff. The Xerography process that was tested on Sleeping Beauty and used to make the featurette Goliath II (released in 1960) was now the answer to making features. The studio could continue to make long-form animated films while abiding by the budgetary concerns, sacrificing what had made those early features so lavish.
While Sleeping Beauty was the expensive film of the two, it had a graphical style that was far more abstract than, say, Cinderella‘s or even one of Fantasia‘s segments. The artwork of one Eyvind Earle came to dominate the film’s visual style, which already played a big part in the look of the previous feature, Lady and the Tramp. Dalmatians is similarly more abstract and different in its art direction. With the imposed budget cuts, the studio went a different direction with the dog movie. Unlike Sleeping Beauty, Dalmatians was a rather rare modern day story, so the setting was used to amplify the more minimalist art direction. While I’m not positing that One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a UPA-esque Disney animated feature, I feel that there are some shades of that studio’s influence in it, and that it’s the closest thing we got to a feature version of early 50s experiments like Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom during that period.
Afterwards, the Disney studio sunk into a comfortable style and stuck with it after Walt’s death and up until the Renaissance era. Disney Animation’s current wave of CG films are pretty and show their budgets, yes, but there hasn’t been a feature of theirs since 2007’s Meet The Robinsons that tried on a completely different style, and one has yet to really experiment in a way that Spider-Verse did, even though they made the equally experimental shorts Paperman and Feast over the past six years. Pixar has stuck to their house style and hyper-realistic glaze for the most part, sometimes the shorts show a little oddness, but little else beyond that.
Anyways, long story short, the UPA style stood against the norm in the 1950s. Its influence leaked into other studios, but then as times changed, the industry latched onto the UPA’s low budgets and not their unique ambitions. The theatrical short cartoon died off, few studios regularly made features like Disney did, cheap kiddie Saturday morning cartoons dominated for around three decades. The early successes of Pixar and DreamWorks started something that has now put us in a similar position. Most commercial CG films have a samey look, despite all the hard work that goes into them. Some styles across different films are a bit different, and I have nothing against the looks of these movies, but why is it the norm? Where’s the diversity in style and storytelling? Live-action and even blockbusters are allowed to have this kind of thing, so why not pure animation? Why does the needle always get stuck for so long in animation?
Why did animation visual presentations become more about the realism and tech than anything else?
I’m grateful for the films that go against this norm. I always crow about Jorge Gutierrez’s The Book of Life, Blue Sky’s Peanuts Movie, and I also like that DreamWorks sometimes goes ape with things like Captain Underpants and parts of the Kung Fu Panda movies (the third one in particularly REALLY pushed the visuals in some scenes), and they don’t have a house style at all. Sony Animation, likewise, didn’t have one either and don’t plan to have one in the future.
Nothing dictates the look of their films, nothing will dictate the look of their future films. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania, and Into The Spider-Verse exist in their own visual spaces, and I think that’s great. What Sony Animation could do with future films is take similar visual risks, and it’s implied that their chief Kristine Belson is seeking to have that happen. Who’s to say that something like The Mitchells vs. the Machines (coming in January 2020) or Vivo (currently slated for November of that year) won’t eschew that photoreal look of previous films? If Spider-Verse is to be a surprise smash, what will the other studio heads be thinking? Into The Spider-Verse feels like the film version of every pent up frustration with the modern feature animation industry. Everything just comes out in one big, determined, enthusiastic burst. It was glorious to witness on the silver screen…
I am really excited about what could happen with animation. That’s different from being excited about where it’s all going, because we don’t know where just yet. Or if what we want will last. This can’t be some short-lived boom, this can’t be some possible trend that the rest of the industry misunderstands, this needs to spark something. Not more comic book movies or more superhero movies, but more animated features with identity, with ambition, with a drive to do something really, really cool. More diversity, in both the storytelling and the visuals, and certainly much more diversity in terms of whose starring in these stories. I’m not saying abolish what’s common, I just want multiple films of different genres and reaches to co-exist in the mainstream features world of the animated medium.
2018 was, to me, a pretty good year for animation. I had already talked about how Isle of Dogs gave me a bit of hope, and how I felt that it and Incredibles 2 had made a little ripple in the water. I also quite appreciated how we had rather different films this year, from didactic and old-fashioned World War II-set family film Sgt. Stubby to the irreverent superhero wackiness of Teen Titans Go! To The Movies (much different from Spider-Verse‘s approach) to the more political-leaning superhero spectacle of Incredibles 2 to the timely internet commentary and heart of Ralph Breaks The Internet to plain fun clever films like Hotel Transylvania 3 and Smallfoot. Mary Poppins Returns, like its classic predecessor, makes heavy use of traditional hand-drawn animation, and that’s always a treat to see on the big screen in this day and age. Some adult animated features are in some form of development right now, perhaps spurred by the success of the Sony-released Sausage Party. Netflix has several promising features of different types in the works, adult films included. Sony Animation is even planning some adult animation down the line. Even though the Netflix stuff won’t be on the big screen, if some of these films get made, they’ll at least exist. There’s a little something brewing in both distinctive and adult animation, you know?
Last year I was rather mopey and angry about what was going on in animation, this year I’m a bit hopeful. I think that says something. While Hollywood tries to make “animation” for people who don’t like animation (see Disney’s “live-action” remakes of their animated features, etc.), some folks within animationland are looking to just walk away from the whole photoreal thing altogether… To make a difference.
I love that it’s happening to some degree…
