Hacker Cinema
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
2018 · Film · 117 min
Part of Spider-Man: Spider-Verse Collection
Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
AnimationActionAdventureScience Fiction
Struggling to find his place in the world while juggling school and family, Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales is unexpectedly bitten by a radioactive spider and develops unfathomable powers just like the one and only Spider-Man. While wrestling with the implications of his new abilities, Miles discovers a super collider created by the madman Wilson "Kingpin" Fisk, causing others from across the Spider-Verse to be inadvertently transported to his dimension.
6 positivefrom 6 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
I watch almost every movie at 2x and I think it usually makes the whole experience better for me. You can tailor your own media experiences however you want. If you disagree with a director's vision for a movie you can bring your own perspective, there's no right or wrong way to watch a movie. It's no different to picking out a specific track in an album, or finding a hook you really enjoy from a specific track and playing it on repeat.
One of the most recent movies I watched and really enjoyed was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was an animation masterpiece, but I still skipped forward in a couple scenes because I don't care about the characters. Some of the animation sequences were interesting enough to merit slowing down to 1x and even going back to rewatch and analyze them in-depth though.
Sometimes I'll encounter a seasonal anime that's quite terrible among multiple dimensions but which has few interesting aspects like creative art design or a couple interesting sequences, so I skim through it to look for those details in order to take them in. It's possible to appreciate various components of a work without caring for the combined result.
One of the things which helped break me out of the normative movie-watching perspective was encountering this art project where a social media page would post every Spongebob frame in order [0]. It made me really start paying attention to a ton of minor details that I hadn't noticed previously, increasing my appreciation for the work that went into making it happen.
In the past you really had no choice but to submit to the director's vision of a work, and you were forced to experience it the same as everyone else in the theater. Now we have more control than ever to enjoy works however we want. Game modding is another variation on this same principle: if I think a game has some bullshit mechanics, I should be able to patch it and play it however I want.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/every-spongebob-frame-in-order
> Is anime a new status quo that will, one day, be upturned by films equivalent to My Neighbor Totoro and Akira — but in a style we can’t imagine yet?
Not that it radically created a new style, but I think the sheer excellence of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse goes to show that the current superhero renaissance/overload misses out on the core strength of the source material- the power of animation. Perhaps when more of those comic book movies actually resemble comic book art can there be a challenger from American animation traditions against the anime status quo.
This is really nice. Although Disney is only currently producing 3D animation films, it's a bit of a shame that nothing about 2D animation is included.
The 3D animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) has a refreshing 3D/2D hybrid visual look that breaks away from the 3D aesthetic common across the industry. I suspect in the future we'll see more animated films with a 2D aesthetic but created with 3D software.
Aside: Disney produced lots of behind-the-scenes for their 2D animated films in the 50s and 60s. Here's one on the MultiPlane Camera - a camera setup that gave 2D animation greater depth:
Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw
Wall-E is by far my favorite Pixar movie, and IMO one of the best in any genre made in the last couple of decades. Really speaks to Pixar's creative genius that they can strike gold from even the most random premise. It is literally about a romantic trash compactor living in a post-apocalyptic Earth.
Fun fact - the film took so long to produce because Andrew Stanton knew Pixar couldn't realistically animate space when he conceived of the idea. Good thing they waited too, as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPW3mvAN0Rc was the final result.
I will say though that after decades of Pixar basically defining the standards of what computer generated animation should be, studios are starting to catch up to and even leapfrog their style. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Arcane are two notable examples of this.
One thing about 2D animation is that it is amenable to an infinite variety of drawing styles. If you can draw it, you can animate it. It's why 2D animation is so appealing, whether in short film or feature film form.
In contrast, 3D animation (for feature films) feels stuck in an aesthetic rut - call it the "Pixar look".
The recent animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has a refreshing 3D/2D hybrid visual look. It's a satisfying break from the 'convential' look of 3D animated movies. I hope the success of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse will inspire more visually varied computer animated films to follow.
Cinema-related, you have CinemaWins (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL8h3ri2WN_-IbviBlWtUcQ) which is probably a spin off of CinemaSins, but you can tell the guy really loves his motion pictures. Take Coco, or take Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, and you'll see what I mean.
"It's really sad to see this art form has died out on a large scale"
I think 2D animation will eventually make a widespread comeback - ironically probably via 3D animation tools. These tools can now convincingly mimic 2D animation (see Blender's Grease Pencil feature as an example). These tools might not use the traditional frame-by-frame technique of 2D animation, but they still open up lots of possibilities. An example is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - it's clearly a 3D film but has a unique 2D/3D aesthetic.
Spider-Man has been rebooted twice in live-action movies since the Raimi version. The last and current incarnation, starring Tom Holland, debuted in Spider-Man: Homecoming, which is getting a sequel this year (Spider-Man: Far From Home). The other reboot, starring Andrew Garfield in two movies, was eminently forgettable.
"Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse" is an alternate-reality version (where SM is a black/latino teenager) in animated form. Somewhat surprisingly, it's also qualitatively better than any live-action version to date. It will probably get a sequel, again in animated form, in the next few years.