Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: A Review

Into the Spider-Verse follows Miles Morales, a Brooklyn teenager bitten by a radioactive spider, pulled into a crisis involving multiple Spider-People from parallel universes. The animation combines CG rendering with hand-drawn linework, Ben-Day dots, and comic panel layouts in ways nobody had done at this scale before. The frame rate drops when Miles is uncertain. It accelerates as he finds his footing. The technique is tracking the character arc. 

Miles works as an origin story because the film understands what origin stories are actually about. Not the powers. The moment you choose to act when everything in you wants to freeze. The leap of faith off the skyscraper, Miles falling upward into the camera, is one of the most purely cinematic shots in recent animation. Shameik Moore and Jake Johnson, as the washed-up Peter B. Parker, give performances grounded enough to hold against all that visual noise. 

The ensemble is generous to a fault. Spider-Man Noir and Peni Parker are funny as visual gags. They’re not quite characters. The film’s biggest structural weakness is that it can’t fully serve everyone it introduces. 

But Spider-Verse proved that genuine risk-taking in mainstream animation pays off both artistically and commercially. Every major animated film since has had to reckon with it. Available on Netflix.

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