Spiderman: Did the animation split into before and after?

The transformation of the heroes is going mostly through the moving pictures – animation and cinema. However, the main roller coaster for the image, character and atmosphere of the former comics’ heroes is animation.

Yes, exactly. Over the years animation has taken the image of superheroes and slowly increased it. Usually, the change is obvious: if the animation becomes different, the hero is different.

But… What if the animation is so different, that it changes not only the perception of the hero but the way the industry holds itself?

So, just at the beginning of 2019, five filmmakers took the Oscars for the Best Animated Feature award for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The moment with the award is a definitive one, for sure; but even without it, the movie made a huge impact on animation in the times when it seemed nothing can be so shocking.

By Agil Prakoso

Expectations and reality

There have been three Spider-Man franchises in sixteen years. The audience of kids, teenagers and grown-ups – essentially, the last ones are just ex-kids who loved a spider hero – are understood to be tired of the same old story.

Too many people just rolled their eyes when they heard about one more spiderman going the same way. “Do we really have to watch it again?”

But when it came to Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, it turned out there is no connection to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s something entirely new —an incredible animated style that is nothing to compare with what we have seen before. And super twisted stories.

“You have to put this into context: there was definitely not a need for more Spider-Man. I think everybody had been pretty fatigued by it. But Kristine Belson, head of the studio at the time, said that Phil Lord and Chris Miller were behind this one. So, there was immediately a different notion of what Spidey could be.

The idea was that we could lean into animation as a medium and finally make something that lived up to the medium that we were adapting, which is the comic book.”

Bob Persichetti, Director

So, what is happening in the cartoon?

Into the Spider-Verse follows the story of Miles Morales – another Brooklyn teenager. However, here’s a big difference from the classic story: he lives in a world that already has a Spider-Man. Wow.

And yet he’s the one to get bitten by a radioactive spider.

A real Spider-Man will put his eye on the new-founded hero, once Miles reveals a different set of spider-type abilities. He is not the only one here!

Later, a group of colorful spider-heroes from other dimensions help him to learn to be a hero and use his abilities.

“For some kids, this will be the first experience of a superhero — and the superhero is going to look like them. The character of Miles Morales is divine. He’s so wonderful and awkward in his teenage self, and honest, and funny. He’s the most likable kid I have ever seen.

This is not a broken family. This is a family that’s thriving and trying to do the best for their son. The parents are professionals. I love that this family of color was represented in a real way, very much like my family. My dad was a cop, my mom worked for the Board of Education. So, for me, this was a very normal representation of what family life was like.”

Luna, Actor

Admit, such a story, diverging from the original is quite interesting. Besides, it gives the youngest audience way more reasons to identify themselves with the character when it is just a boy.

But the story – and we are 100% sure here – is secondary to the animation style. It is absolutely shocking in comparison with other styles in western animation, but also nothing we could expect from this particular picture.

We say it not because animation is our main subject. Not at all.

It seems to us that this movie is a kind of divided animation of “before” and “after”. That’s completely amazing.

“The animation style takes a while to get used to, but once you do you’ll become fully immersed in a stunningly realized world which simply wouldn’t have had the same impact in live-action. The same can be said for the incredible action sequences, which, while plentiful, never come at the expense of a brilliantly developed story – one which goes to some surprisingly dark places at times.” 

Mark Cassidy, comic book movie critic

The standards that Western animation created in the last years

From cartoon to cartoon, depending on the studio, we all had some expectations in terms of visuality. Why is that so? The thing is pretty simple: over the last 5-10 years animation built the borders of the styles the audience used to.

Of course, there were some cracks in it, and the occasional cartoon would reveal it by showing something slightly different.

Speaking generally, animation was always beautiful though the image, style, and the way characters are shaped – expected.

“Before we had any visuals or any real goal, there was one big question that put everyone on the same page, which was: How far can we go? How much can we possibly change from the source material? In the past, I’ve had entire art departments trying to convince the executives to change. This was the exact opposite, where before we even started thinking what to do, they were asking us to change as much as possible.” 

Joshua Beveridge, Head of Character Animation

But studios and directors didn’t really try to push the boundaries of animation far away from what people used to, and therefore, what they loved. There was a great need not only for new ways of telling the old stories but a demand – maybe not at all conscious – to look through other lenses.

Comment from Bob Persichetti, Director

“For me, it was important to really push on the animation side and push on the visual side.”

The entire film was pushing the boundaries of design and style, experimenting with details, as well as the general picture.

It was visible that the creative team after Spiderman wanted the film to be as close as possible to an illustration and comic book style. But in pursuit of that, it is easy to lose an emotional connection.

The combination of drawing and then animating facial lines were vital to how expressive our characters could be.  It was these strong emotional character performances that allowed us to push the style and look of the entire film.

By Chelsea Blecha

The role of the narrative

The story and its structure touch on a lot of themes familiar to the old fags from the comic book films. Superhero stuff like responsibility and super-abilities identity is still there. Also, the double life of a teenager who seeks to elude the all-seeing parental eye, and the dramas of puberty. But this is a version of growing up in a superhero way with rap and the noise of the metropolis.

It is hilarious at some points, but not devoid of dark twists. The whole genre has become more mature.

The scripting is wonderful: at some point, we understand that directors are trying to say that anyone has something to be heroes in the way natural to us.

But the main conflict in the cartoon is not with the villain. Nope. The search for the identity of the hero is split into several equal variations of himself.  It’s no exaggeration to say that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the craziest superhero movie in cinematic history.

How did animation change after Spider-verse?

The aesthetic of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had a profound effect on Western animation. It had pushed many studios to rethink the way they make animation, to find new decisions, and quite often, use the inventions of the Spider-verse as trampling for their own visuals.

Recent “The Bad Guys” clearly shows how it has influenced the movie.

 Same with the animated series “Intergalactic”, in which the voice-over artists were movie stars like Timothée Chalamet and Macaulay Culkin.

If you think about it, in the visual web of the cartoon there are elements of street art, computer games and comics. A unique receipt that has been overlooked for a while.

Blindsided by the visuals of the movie – the unique aesthetics of the old magazine comics with their unnatural, and yet powerful colors – many directors and studios started to take these features into their own creations.

But the main thing about the whole thing – animation, story, and all of it together – is embodied postmodernism. Why?

Listen to this: at some point, we realize that we are watching an adaptation of your fears, something that was a reason not to watch it in the first place.

There were an infinite number of Spider-Man, right?  Well, they all met in one cartoon, where parallel universes – a concept from both theoretical physics and mainstream comics, which interestingly coincide in such different areas – become one at a single point.

The superhero myth is taken to another point, with a bit of irony and hope,  lining up to the final in an amazingly beautiful pattern.

After this, we wait for other superhero stories to find another point of view.

Conclusion

Of course, the directors and the studio couldn’t stop on just one Spiderman story, there’s got to be more.

Spider-Man. The creators have chosen the right path – aesthetic experiments that surprise the viewer. The second part is expected in October 2022. Prepare yourself for more visual pleasure, and an even more crazy story in the best sense of the word.

All the different spider guys in this story seemed to be lucky to acquire such abilities. But they did not really save them from loneliness, the horrors of growing up or broken hearts. Very ordinary things.

In the end, we see a beautiful message in this wonderful animation: being mediocre is not a shame.

What a great way to say that through such a great achievement in animation.

“The story is delightful and important in its inclusion of an array of races and genders taking on the Spider-mantle, and the animation is jaw-dropping. It’s as close to a moving comic book as I’ve ever seen, and it’s saturated with dazzling colors and animation techniques that look completely new to me.

If you’re skeptical, trust me, I get it. But I can’t come up with enough superlatives to describe how much darn fun Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is.”

Fletcher Powell, critic