Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a 2018 American computer-animated superhero film featuring the Marvel Comics character Miles Morales / Spider-Man, produced by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation in association with Marvel Entertainment, and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. (Wikipedia)
Gotta hand it to Sony. After the dismal performance of Amazing Spider-Man 2, it looked like their proposed Spider-Verse was dead and buried.
But here we are, in the wake of a strategic tie-up with Marvel Studios, witnessing the revival of the Spider-Verse, with this animated Spider-Man movie, coming on the heels of a very successful Venom adaptation.
As a comic book geek, it was a sheer joy to see how this movie embraced the visual storytelling we know and love. Spider-Man : Into the Spider-Verse certainly breaks new ground in the animation field – eschewing the manga sensibilities of most superhero animated movies and the more established cartoony styles of Pixar and Dreamworks,
Personally, I have no love for most of these Spider-Man spin-off characters viz. Miles Morales, Spider-Gwen etc. So the story failed to resonate with me whatsoever.
From the beginning, I have always felt that Miles Morales is a contrived superhero character with no reason to exist except for his racial makeup – the worst reason of all. Almost as bad as the original reason for creating the likes of Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Spider-Woman etc.
But thankfully, the visuals were so utterly magnificient (that Sienkiewicz inspired Kingpin was awesome!) that for once, I was able to ignore the plot and characterisations (apart from the superb interactions between Miles and Peter Parker) and savour the graphic storytelling.
If nothing else, I sincerely hope that it provides a new visual direction for superhero animated movies – DC, are you paying attention???
Watch now on Amazon
… still there’s more …