The Spiderverse

 It's a canon event.

After putting it off for way too long I finally made the effort to go out and see the both of the 'Spider Verse' movies that have painted the animated version of the on-going Spiderman renaissance that so far remains the only aspect of modern Superhero content that hasn't fallen the way of 'stale'. (Okay, I hear good things about Guardian's of the Galaxy 3, but for the sake of this arguement let's pretend that Spiderverse and the 'Home' series are lone islands of 'quality' amidst a sea of inequity.) And in that light one might wonder why I put it off for so long... and I don't know. Haven't a clue. Guess I'm just stupid like that. Because much as how I've heard from everyone and been affirmed time and time again- Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and Across the Spiderverse are two of the greatest works of collaborative visual art ever put to film.

As the case is with a lot of people out there, Spiderman was really the first 'superhero' I had any form of knowledge of. It seems that DC fans are either introduced to Superman first (although that's something of an older generation origin hero) or Batman (through sheer abundance of content related to the dark crusader) whereas Marvel-heads seems to almost always start with Spiderman. And why not? He's homely. Terrestrial, young, ambitious- all the things that the world expects out of you in your youth, on a silver platter in the early years, and in chain-linked silver cuffs for those latter years. So much about Spiderman's life and person is about hope and perseverance in the face of a very human darkness, the kind of personal darkness that doesn't always seem from the robes of ancient evil or invading monsters, but sometimes from everyday life and human interaction. Whereas other heroes tended to yield their limiting humanity as a gimmick, flaunting loud and tacky character flaws as one-note facets of their entire building, Peter Parker has always felt more rounded than that, more dimensional, as a kid or a man just trying to navigate who he needs to be with who he wants to be.

As you can likely imagine, I've become something of a stickler for Spiderman and the way he's portrayed in media, which might have attributed somewhat to my reticence in recent years to engage with anything that might shatter that human image I have of the Spider Mythos in my heart. Just look at my recent review of 'Spiderman PC', one of my reoccurring points of praise was for the characterisation of Peter Parker and how they didn't lose the human in the hero. Coming to Spiderverse I knew this was going to be a story about Miles Morales and though the brain in me knew better than to think that of all places would be a time to let the heart of the hero drop, I guess my brain isn't always making the decisions, now is it? But enough pre-amble; the point is that I few days ago I sat down and watched 'Into the Spiderverse' and quickly followed that up by rushing out to the cinema to watch the only movie that made money this year: 'Across the Spiderverse'. (I jest. The new Insidious movie probably took 20 bucks and a pack of smokes to make: I assume that will break even too.)

Of course the first thing that anyone talks about when it comes to Spiderverse is the visual diversity; a collage of different animation styles, more than it's possible to count, with so many on-screen techniques and quirks all joining in tandem it boggles the mind to even try and recount them. With both movies it affronts me just how visually unsafe the whole thing is, switching fluidly from style to style to blended style to visual storytelling methods. Computer animation with bubble-gum pop-art with hand-drawn 2D with cell-shaded bursts, emotional colour seeped universes and varying frame-rates of characters to convey their quality of movement. It's like a tapestry made of a thousand pulling threads of different material, hewn from different animal hairs, all threatening to rub together poorly and ruin the texture of the finished piece but somehow, increadibly, brought together with such mastery as to compliment one another and create something better than the sum of it's parts. Spiderverse would have made a spectacular static art piece; but these lunatics made it a full fledged movie instead.

Animation in movies have been in something of a path towards homogenisation ever since the 3D era of Disney fell upon us. When computer generation started to get good enough to render entire films and Disney established itself as a shining example of the highest echelon of CG, it seems every other quality animation studio has been edging to make their products look more and more indistinguishable from the Disney style. Dreamworks, WB, Universal and Sony Pictures at some points, all wanted their movies to mimic the Disney big eyes, round faces, rich colours- I'd argue that Blue Sky Animation would be the only outliers purely for the fact that their movies looked hideous. That was, until Spiderverse reminded everyone just how diverse animation can be.

That pursuit of close-to-life-but-animated really rubbed against the heart of what visual entertainment can achieve once you shake off those traditional chains, and no one was really taking advantage of the freedom of animation on a big budget scale anymore. Spiderverse reminded us of experimental visual art theory, indirect methods of narrative progression and the unreserved excitement of imperfect genre-blending fusion. It actually reminds me of some of the more unique and memorable styles of Anime out there, which will mix and match concepts to create more of a unique visual identity. Heck, I'm even pretty sure that Across the Spiderverse borrowed a bit from Jojo's style for Gwen's Universe in the use of abstract shape backgrounds during important foreground-focus events. I love those techniques that make you look at the whole canvas and just go wow.

And, of course, the actual movement of the choreography is simply insane. Dealing with various Spidermen it was obvious the movie was going to have to convey agility, but the amount of different ways that the team figured out how to express that agility is just mind boggling. There's Gwen and the way she spins through the air like a top at the apex of her swings, sometimes not even bending her legs from one arc to the other- the strange spinning top yo-yo powers of Pavtir Spiderman that seems to pull him as much as he sends it- every Spiderman has a unique way of moving, and webbing and swinging- Miles hasn't even got his glide suit wings in this iteration and he still manages to stand out simply due to the intent of the storyboarding. Across The Spiderverse in particular really does an extra fantastic job in the cohesion of heavy action scenes too, where I longer found myself getting lost in big expressive action sequences with how they visualised and spaced every location intuitively.

I don't go to the Cinema often and when I do I'm very careful about the films that I watch so that I don't come away disappointed. Most times, I'll only commit to the cinema experience if I think the product is something worthy of nothing less than the full cinematic treatment. The Spiderverse movies have proven themselves to be pure cinematic excellence in their every step and I stand in genuine wonderment trying to figure out how the artists are even going to attempt to top themselves for the next outing. There's so much more that I'm just not clever enough to talk about, such as the clever hidden nodes and musical theory hidden in the soundtrack and various themes, the effect of 2099's stabbing riff almost being akin the the spine-tingling effect of the Wolf's Whistle from The Last Wish. I'm a freshly born Spiderverse fanatic, now newly in love with a brand that has been close to me ever since I was a kid. Of course, now I have to wait six years for the next one... bugger.