Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

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.