How the Spider-Verse Movies impacted animation

 

So, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse just released and it is phenomenal. It’s just as good if not better than its predecessor and really has me excited for the next movie in this trilogy and how it will wrap up the story of this version of Miles. And while a discussion of the movie is entirely worthy of its own post, I’m actually here instead to discuss how the first Spider-Verse movie impacted animation when it first released and how it continues to impact that genre as a whole, let’s talk about it.

BEFORE RELEASE

So before we talk about how the movies impacted animation, we need to go back a long way. Plans for an animated Spider-Man movie go back as far as 2015 when it was officially announced that Phil Lord and Chris Miller would be writing a movie for Sony who by this point were in the aftermath of the Amazing Spider-Man 2’s failure and had to partner with Marvel to bring Peter Parker into the MCU. In 2016, Lord and Miller completed a script for the movie and Sony chose Bob Persichetti to direct it, eventually Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman would also join as co-directors as well. And in 2017, we got our first look. In December 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse released to huge critical acclaim and Sony for the first time arguably since 2004 had made a fantastic Spider-Man movie, the film grossed 384.3 million USD and led to a huge influence on Miles Morales in comics and his popularity exploded with his own solo video game titled Spider-Man: Miles Morales in 2020, but moving on…

ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

In 2019, Sony announced plans for a sequel to Spider-verse which Lord and Miller would be writing the screenplay for. The film was originally planned as a 2-part movie but the decision was made to make them separate movies with an overarching story, kind of like Endgame and Infinity War and how those films connected.

Across the Spider-Verse released on June 2^nd and much like its predecessor was received extremely well and for some has also outdone the previous movie in terms of how good it is, and I can very much agree with that. The movie is amazing, spectacular and of course sensational.

THE ANIMATION

Now the biggest part of the Spider-Verse movies in many fans’ eyes is the animation, it is gorgeous to look at. With the first movie, Lord and Miller wanted the movie to have its own unique style and mixed traditional hand-drawn comic book techniques with modern computer animation and it was probably one of the smartest moves I’ve seen in an animated film. The first movie also featured a large team of animators consisting of 140 artists being involved on production, that’s dedication. But when it came to Across the Spider-Verse, oh boy did Sony step it up in a huge way. Now across the Spider-Verse features a lot more variants of Spider-Man with characters like Gwen Stacy, Miguel O Hara and Hobie Brown, whose character animation in this movie took the Spider-Verse Animators 2 to 3 years to complete in time for the movie.

Remember when I said that 140 animators worked on the first movie? Well good because this movie had ten times as many animators with 1,000 artists working on this movie, I mean you’ve gotta admire the dedication there right? Plus this to my knowledge is one of the longest animated movies ever produced.

THE IMPACT

The release of the first Spider-Verse movie began impacting the world in a big way, for one thing it led to Miles Morales getting a lot more exposure in comic books and I have a very strong feeling it led to his own spin-off game at Insomniac.

But it’s not just comic and video games we need to talk about here, because thanks to Spider-Verse the animation genre as a whole is now becoming rejuvenated, not in terms of animated shows but more in terms of animated movies. This is an example of what I like to call “The Spider-Verse Effect and I have 3 main animation examples I’ll be using to demonstrate my point.

Now thanks to Spider-Verse, other animation studios took note of what made that movie work and started applying that to their own works and the first example I’m using to demonstrate my point is Dreamworks, who put out 2 very well received animated films last year including “The Bad Guys” and “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”. With the former, Dreamworks began incorporating more illustrative and stylized animation aesthetics into the designs for the environment and the characters but with the latter, it’s a little different. 

Because the story of Puss in Boots has it’s origins in fairy tales, the animation style for The Last Wish was designed to make the film look more like storybook illustrations and using new technology the animation team at Dreamworks focused more on a painterly style design, to make the film look like a fairy-tale world as opposed to previous films in the Shrek franchise not having that kind of style.

 

And finally we come to the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie titled “Mutant Mayhem” and loads of people myself included have noted that its animation style is very comparable to Spider-Verse and that’s because like Spider-Man, the Turtles also have their roots in comic books. The main takeaway from the animation style of this movie is that it looks to be inspired by the grittier depiction of New York as drawn by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, but I can understand why Spider-Verse’s unique style can be seen as a similarity here.

 

But in conclusion, I think that Spider-Verse’s impact on animation is only just beginning and if Across the Spider-Verse is anything to go by then I think more animated films will look to these movies as a prime example of how animation can be done justice on the big screen.