Is Sony Pictures Animation’s 2018 multidimensional superhero masterpiece a reversal of feature animation trends that have been brewing since the dawn of computer animated features? Is it, in fact, a reversal of what’s been going on with the features end of the medium since the end of animation’s first Golden Age?
I think it’s a rather… Iconoclastic feature of sorts. American-produced animated features like it have existed beforehand, but this was a big film, a grand statement, and something that walked into territory that big screen, mainstream feature animation often isn’t allowed to tackle. Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is a culmination of sorts, the first big bang in an underground movement in computer animation. For a couple of years, we’ve seen films like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Book of Life, and Captain Underpants present the notion that an animated film can be unabashedly “animated” again. These were films that didn’t make cartoony characters look as close to real life as possible and placing them in photorealistic environments. They in some way or another embraced the inherent unrealness of most art, whether it’s drawings or paintings. Into The Spider-Verse expanded upon that, wove it all into a blockbuster action spectacle aimed at a wide audience, and told its irreverent story in such a sophisticated manner that you don’t see much of in most modern animation. In many ways, it’s what you would call a godsend, and it paid off rather nicely. The $90 million-costing film has made over $363 million at the worldwide box office so far, which is around 4x its budget. It has made over 5x its opening weekend in the states, a rare number for most movies, even animated movies. It has also collected all of the awards, including the coveted Oscar.
For a while, I had been wondering when feature-length computer animation would finally enter a period of UPA-esque experimentation. For many, Spider-Verse is it, or at least the beginning. Something to break up the monotony of abundant photorealism in cinema, in both all-animated movies and live-action/VFX-laden spectacles. Into The Spider-Verse was a film that showed what animation and cinema could be, a new kind of moving illustration on the big screen and a tomato to the eye of photorealism and its apparent superiority. It came out last year, just a few months ago. This year, The Walt Disney Company will release its remake of their animated classic The Lion King, a remake done *entirely* in computer animation, but it’s all completely photorealistic. There’s nothing abstract, cartoony, painterly, or unreal about any of it. It looks like a complete and total simulation of a live-action movie. It’s animation for people who don’t like animation (“You gotta problem with cartoons?”), perhaps the culmination of everything done with CGI in movies dating all the way back to the era of Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. Once a major supplement to a live-action movie, now the whole movie…
I find it fascinating that both movies were finished so close to each other. One movie shows what animation could be in this day and age, the other has taken the animated medium to recreate real-life right down to the exact details and tones. The Lion King (2019) might just be the first feature film to ever do that, going one step beyond what we’ve seen in movies like Avatar, Life of Pi, Gravity, and The Jungle Book (2016). In Hollywood and Disney’s race to keep photorealism the “superior” form of moviemaking, they’ve created the anti-animation animated movie… That happens to be a remake of a 25-year-old traditional, hand-drawn animated movie that used CG in various places. They did this using live-action (see Beauty and the Beast 2017), now they’re doing it with animation. Sony Pictures Animation, on the other hand, used animation to create an artistic film. Not just a film with a strong story, but a film that was worth seeing on the big screen for the visuals alone. A living, breathing, abstract comic book illustration. You hadn’t seen anything like it before. One film is innovative, one film is just Hollywood being Hollywood.
Sony Animation’s film boldly rejects Hollywood’s animation post-Pixar doctrine. Into The Spider-Verse completely eschewed the plasticky, as-close-to-real-life-as-possible visual look that’s pursued at other studios, continuous refinements of the look that Pixar established in their early short films and the first Toy Story. We got so far away from animation being unreal over the past 20 years, and ended up with a smorgasbord of films that seem to be vying for acceptance, big box office, etc. Spider-Verse did none of that, and while it didn’t make ridiculous numbers, its success (4x the budget ain’t half bad!) is a good start. Next, someone has to be brave enough to keep trying, despite those numbers and potential failures in the future.
Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is proof that you can make a reasonably-budgeted, visually unique animated feature and still get nicely rewarded for it. No, the film is not a Frozen or Despicable Me-sized megasmash, but not every animated feature is destined to pull such numbers out of a hat. A box office gross occurs over a set of months, a short amount at that. The long run is forever, and that’s important. Spider-Verse did not outgross Incredibles 2 and Ralph Breaks The Internet, it came nowhere near the former, yet it’s getting most of the awards and is a critical darling. It’ll be a long-lasting flavor, for sure. It is more culturally important, too. Animated movies aren’t a genre. Action movies are a genre, do we expect EVERY action movie to make Marvel Cinematic Universe numbers? On top of that? Do we expect EVERY MCU movie to make Avengers and Black Panther numbers? No. Then we shouldn’t expect every animated movie to be as big as a typical $500 million+ grossing animated success. That mentality is what’s limiting animation in this day and age. Spider-Verse is an action movie that’s comedic and has a sci-fi backdrop, it just happens to be done in animation that doesn’t look exactly like real life. It more than challenges the “animation is a genre” notion.
In fact, Sony Pictures Animation has done a little bit of that rather recently, in some of way or another.
While some of their films conform to the Hollywood animation rules (The Emoji Movie especially), they’ve also made films like The Star. Think about it, a low budget animated niche movie (it’s a Christian movie, an animal retelling of the Nativity story) that could’ve very well went straight to video. No, it went into wide theatrical release. Sony knew it wasn’t going to make Despicable Me numbers, or even Captain Underpants numbers. They knew what they were releasing: A little Christian movie that happened to be animated, they gave it a wide release and backed it enough. I’m not trying to posit that The Star is some kind of punk animated movie, it’s far from it, but the fact that a major Hollywood studio put that out in theaters kind of says something.
Hollywood wants all animated features to be these big Minions, Disney Princesses, please-all toy-selling franchise machines. Sony Animation put out a microbudgeted Sunday school movie in late 2017. Sony Pictures also distributed an R-rated animated comedy called Sausage Party, which may not have done anything new for the medium, but in the context of modern mainstream feature animation? It stuck out like a sore thumb. Fox, through their indie label Fox Searchlight, had the guts to expand Wes Anderson’s adult-oriented stop-motion adventure Isle of Dogs into nearly 2,000 theaters. Fox also happened to back Reel FX’s The Book of Life, and also released DreamWorks’ Captain Underpants. There’s some rippling going on here, and Sony’s mostly doing it. Fox contributed. Big Disney, big Universal (sans their rather unsupportive releasing of the first four Laika movies), big Paramount? Barely contributed. Paramount even chickened out of releasing the French stop-motion feature The Little Prince, Netflix came in and rescued it. Netflix has several off-kilter animated features in the works. Streaming services are doing a better job at preserving animation ideals than most of Hollywood is willing to. It’s part of the reason why Steven Spielberg’s recent comments on Netflix and awards season make me shiver a bit.
But right now, Spider-Verse and its ilk stood tall against what Hollywood has pushed for in animation post-1995. While Disney’s Lion King remake reached a height in photorealism, the ceiling perhaps, Spider-Verse expanded the CG canvas like spreading wildfire. It took computer animation way too long to get there, after a handful of experiments. Does Spider-Verse begin something new? Or is it another baby step towards something greater? Its success should not be overlooked in favor of the umpteenth Minions movie making 10x its budget…
