Just like the first installment, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse flaunts a distinct comic-book style that sets a new standard for the entire animation industry. That offset printing art style is still here like from the first movie, but now it triples down on the technique by adapting it to different parts of the multiverse. Furthermore, this sequel steps things up by including nearly three hundred more uniquely designed Spider-Beings that thrive in the multiverse, each with a unique art style and animation style. The wildly fun sequence of all these Spider-Beings chasing Miles Morales was so technically advanced that it took two years to create.
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Of these universes across the multiverse, Gwen Stacy’s home takes the watercolor style from her spinoff comics as the environment responds to her emotions. Of the characters that come in from other parts of the multiverse, the evil Vulture appears in a very old-school DaVinci art style. The attention to detail goes shockingly deep into every single frame, the colors of the Puerto Rican flag even pop up briefly when Miles’ mother snaps her fingers (to reference her cultural heritage). It’s unfathomable to think that such backbreaking work went into an animated film that’s almost two-and-a-half hours long… the longest of any American animated film in history. With a runtime that long, nearly everyone should find entertainment value in what will soon be celebrated as one of the greatest sequels of all time.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse wowed the world with its unique pop art visual style—one that captures the exact essence of a vintage comic book. Everything done to translate that atmosphere into the world of computer animation breaks the rules of filmmaking, resulting in a beautiful marriage between 2D and 3D storytelling. As a result of all their hard work and late nights, the animators developed new techniques to better manage the back-and-forth process of manually trying to solve an animation problem and letting the computer do the work for them. Here are only a few of the techniques that made this studio trend-setter so impactful:
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Elements that would normally go out of focus throughout the film instead have their separate CMYK color channels shift slightly like offset comic book print. Shadows are made from hashed lines and Kirby dots. Two-dimensional form lines are placed on the characters’ faces. Background objects are made from moving blobs of color or static paintings in windows. The characters are frequently animated only every other frame without any motion blur, but other characters sometimes break that rule depending on which alternate reality across the Spider-Verse they’re from. Their varying animation styles range from Spider-Ham’s cartoonish quirks to Spider-Gwen’s ballet-esque movements. Yet that’s just the surface of the details contained within this game-changing animated blockbuster, one that’s outdone anything ever done by Disney or Pixar, and will continue pushing the entire animated medium forward.

PG (DLV)
Action/Sci-fi
1 hr. 57 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY.
Watch it to feel SAD.
Watch it to feel AFRAID.

Not only is this a cinematic version of the first concert to ever gross over one-billion dollars, but it’s also the overdue shake-up to the entire movie theater industry. Rather than how other major studios would normally tell theaters far in advance when to book their next tentpole movie release, Taylor contacted those theaters herself, blocking out all of October so that no other major releases would conflict with her film. As a result, the cinematic version of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour became one of the biggest hits of 2023, making huge theater crowds lining up for a theatrical event a reality once again after the COVID-19 pandemic hurt the industry.
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For what feels like the first time, fans are able to experience a live concert without the messy crowds, loud noises, or expensive tickets that may discourage them from going. Yet these fans are still encouraged to wear friendship bracelets, t-shirts, and other T-Swift related merchandise, getting the freedom to participate in the theater the same way they would at the live concert. In fact, watching the concert this way provides the extra advantage of seeing Taylor more up close and personal; it’s easier to see how openly grateful she is toward her adoring fans. Thanks to this largely influential musician’s desire to make her body of work more accessible will save movie theaters, a new chapter to what the theatrical experience is all about has begun.

PG-13 (DLS)
Documentary/Musical
2 hr. 49 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to LEARN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY.

Hayao Miyazaki last made a feature-length motion picture a full decade before making this one, and he ended up leaving retirement to spend seven years directing this deeply personal WWII-era epic. Since that essentially makes The Boy and the Heron an ultimatum of Miyazaki’s legacy in cinema, the animation techniques are much more advanced and up-to-date now. That includes a new installment for Studio Ghibli: Dolby Cinema, a technology that better distinguishes the highlights and lowlights of the movie’s image. Yet the skill of the animators remains tremendous, particularly when animating the heron, who appears grotesque in the most uncanny of ways.
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The entirety of the movie includes a similar contrast of beauty against darkness. The story is indeed grim, but the magical score helps keep the experience from being too overwhelming; the music complements every emotional peak of the story perfectly and even presents a wonderful new song, “Spinning Globe.” The fact that such an emotionally delicate work of animation finally got recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures is a big deal. Not only is it the first hand-drawn animated film to win Best Animated Feature since Spirited Away twenty-one years ago, not only is it the first international film to win since then, but it’s also the first ever PG-13 movie to win in that category. Therefore, this important Oscar win is guaranteed to change the entire animation industry forever.

As director Greta Gerwig made the creative decisions for this ambitious blockbuster movie, she refused to go with what the adult in herself would’ve wanted, but rather what the little kid in herself would’ve wanted. Sure enough, her vision led to the set and costume designers using more shades of pink than anyone ever thought could exist. The sets resemble life-size Barbie houses- all authentically artificial and built to scale with the actors (the car Barbie drives is 23% smaller than an actual car). For the fun sequences of the bridge between Barbieland and the real world, scenes are depicted in various locations, all with moving background canvases and multiple layers of artificial set pieces that move.
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Every Barbie party outfit ever sold is referenced in the dance party scene, and even the brand’s more forbidden dolls are included in the cast, such as “Growing Up Skipper” and “Sugar’s Daddy Ken.” Makeup tests were done as well on Margot Robbie to make sure she looked as perfect as a stereotypical Barbie doll—a process that took approximately a year. This huge movie would be nothing however without the brash musical score and hit songs, which demonstrate what happens when filmmakers don’t take themselves too seriously and just have some fun. Yet these filmmakers balance that fun with a loving critique of the Barbie brand’s legacy, which is why Barbie will soon change future tentpole movies forever.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a family drama disguised as a martial arts movie that utilizes its weird content to conduct a study about existentialism and generational trauma from the perspective of a broken Chinese-American family. Many alternate realities are depicted across this multiverse, and each one has a distinct color palette, set of lenses, use of grain, and aspect ratios… which sometimes change on the spot in a single shot. They’re all designed to imitate a specific cinematic genre and have their own standalone story with a beginning, middle, and end, which in turn complement the main story.

Symbolic imagery is utilized to hold everything together, such as the round mirrors to represent the fear of self, or the everything bagel to represent the black hole that the main character, Evelyn, fears her daughter is getting closer to. This movie also sets a higher bar for how all movies, big and small, should approach their practical stunts and practical effects, even using an animatronic raccoon that looks like it came from the 1980s. But best of all, this incomparable movie speaks sincerely about traditional Chinese values in a way that will help make Asian cultures more mainstream in America’s media—which it does in a fashion that guarantees tears from the audience over the wounded bond between a mother and daughter that they can relate to all too closely.

There was no screenplay, everything was instead laid out on detailed storyboards, which fit director George Miller’s artistic vision that depended on visual details to offer worldbuilding exposition. As Miller crafted his reimagining of his 1970s/1980s film series, production grew gradually more insane, seeing how the crew relied on practical stunts in the Namibian desert with elaborate large vehicles moving at a hundred miles an hour. Stunt actors had to leap from vehicle to vehicle in the air, and the climax utilized these long swinging poles that served as extra transportation between the cars and trucks. It got immensely difficult and dangerous to film the more than 300 stunts between the 150 uniquely designed vehicles for this motion picture, but it paid off.
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The action is unnaturally fast yet surprisingly fluid, the sound quality is earsplittingly loud yet crystal clear, and the views of the desert are every bit as spectacular and mesmerizing as a Renaissance painting. Every element chosen to make up this ambitious blockbuster is chosen with careful intentionality—the average person will be rewarded with multiple rewatches as new details will be spotted after every viewing that further illustrates this post-apocalyptic future where everyone’s been degraded to being mere things. So along with its pioneering new techniques in editing, sound design, and cinematography, Mad Max: Fury Road will continue to inspire other filmmakers on what “show don’t tell” really looks like.

With its anamorphic lens cinematography and its use of Ave Maria in the musical score, this darker take on the world’s greatest detective is essentially an independent art-house film that happens to have an enormous budget. As it lays out the story arc of Batman over a near-three-hour runtime, the story maintains a fast pace that balances its quicker moments with doses of symbolic imagery meant to represent the stark contrasts between beauty and death coming together. All these mise-en-scène elements work hand-in-hand to create some unforgettable adrenaline-heavy fight scenes, each held together by inky shadows that make various lighting effects such as flames and strobe lights stand out further.

​Yet it’s the designs that really shine the most, and not just because of the four hours’ worth of prosthetic work behind Colin Farrell’s Penguin makeup. The batsuit was made out of 3D-printed molded rubber and then stitched by hand, while Bruce Wayne’s eye makeup stayed on his face whenever he removed his cowl. Every location is the perfect stage for a spectacular action-packed sequence, each one sustaining a cold and grim color palette to match the way Wayne views himself amidst the city’s chaos. So even while this movie suffers from weak female characters and Colin Farrell’s ultra-hammy performance, The Batman deserves some appreciation for how it further elevates the artistic potential of motion pictures based on comic books.

To capture the big emotional rush that a finale deserves, the designers and VFX artists behind this highly anticipated eighth film give it their all. Starting with the battle at Hogwarts, the biggest action set piece the series has ever created, stone statues come to life, giants and spiders are spotted within the chaos, and a large amount of stunt choreography with teenage extras went into these sequences. To make things a bit easier while filming these very complex shots, many of the broken stone bits on the battlefields were made of a lightweight substitute. Though it’s not just Hogwarts, Gringotts is also revisited with an updated design to fit the darker, more realistic tone of the film compared to the first movie it was seen in.
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The filmmaking style also pulls no punches in capturing exactly what moviegoers during the 3D boom of cinema at the time wanted. Elements are constantly flying through the air, thousands of objects multiply inside a vault, a stark white set depicts an empty King’s Cross Station, a giant dragon flies through the sky, and even the approaches to filming a ghost and a snake are utilized in efforts that justify seeing the movie in 3D. So despite feeling incomplete as only the second half of a book adaptation, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- Part 2 sets the gold standard for how a series finale should be handled.

With it being the beginning of the end, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- Part 1 was part of the production crew’s final exam about everything they learned from the past decade of making a revolutionary cinematic saga. The scene of the seven Potters alone demonstrates how far the effects in the series have come, as six of the actors transform into Harry Potter with the power of motion capture. Then Daniel Radcliffe had to match the movements and mannerisms of every one of them as he played them in separate shots that were all combined into one.
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But that’s just a couple of minutes of screentime, another major difficulty for the set designers was the Ministry of Magic set, which got destroyed two movies earlier and had to be entirely rebuilt again. Other effects had to stretch the imagination of the VFX artists, such as by putting an LED suit on a dog to create the light of a CGI Patronus, while other scenes took weeks to plan, such as one taking place in Piccadilly Square that was full of over 500 extras. However, this film overall still feels incomplete as just the first half of a story, as one could argue that the last book was split into two movies to rake in more money. Yet this penultimate film in the series did what it needed to get done to get audiences pumped for the true finale.