Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

MFC Review

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the latest film on our friendly neighbor SpiderMan outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman and produced by Sony Pictures Animation in association with Marvel Entertainment, Spider-Man: Into the Spider‑Verse was announced on July 2015 and finally released on December 2018. Its long production process resulted in one of the most ambitious animated films of the decade, winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2019.

The movie introduces us to Miles Morales (played by Shameik Moore), a kid from New York who will assume the task of becoming Spider-Man after the villain Kingpin, played by Liev Schreiber (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, 2009), messes with reality’s stability. Thanks to that, Miles learns that he’s not the only Spider-Man around, but he starts being assisted by other incarnations of the hero like Peter Parker, played by Jake Johnson (New Girl, 2011-2018), Spider-Woman, played by Hailee Steinfeld (Bumblebee, 2018), and Spider-Man Noir, played by Oscar winner Nicolas Cage (Kick-Ass, 2010), among others, to help restore the order in the multiverse.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse takes animation films one step further. It used a process so sophisticated that, considering that one month work produced only 4 seconds of video, required a team of 800 animators to complete the film in 4 years.

The animation excels by emulating certain visual styles and techniques common in comics, making the public feel immersed in comic pages, and paying special attention to each frame’s composition, so that each one would look like an independent illustration, ending up with a film of great personality.

The movie featured high-class actors such as Chris Pine (Wonder Woman, 2011), Zoë Kravitz (Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, 2018) and Oscar Winner Mahershala Ali (Green Book, 2018), and was dedicated to the creators of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, who passed away on July 2018, and the legendary Stan Lee, who passed on November 2018, giving us one last cameo in the film.

Although in 2015 Marvel Studios and Sony came to an agreement in which the characters could be included in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the rights to the Spider-Man films continue in Sony’s hands. They’re working right now on building their own Spider-based universe, starting with Venom (2018) and moving on with the Spider-verse, with sequels and spin-off already planned.

Opening a new way for animated superhero films not limited to TV releases, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse looks to inspire everyone to become heroes, leaving differences aside and uniting the particularities that distinguish us in pursuit of the common good, because “With great power, comes a great responsibility”.