Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse: Feel Your Spidey Senses Tingle

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was not high on my list of movies to watch this year. A cartoon about Spider-Man? Why would I care? I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the fact that it was co-produced by Marvel and therefore would have the whole MCU brain trust behind it. And after I saw dozens of rave reviews online and then rave reviews from colleagues, I headed off to the theater.

The most immediately magnificent aspect of this movie is the animation. It’s brand new technology that Disney is now looking to patent and it is awe-inspiringly good. I can’t quite describe it except to say that everything looks exactly like a comic book - the same cross-hatching and dots with the screen occasionally getting divided into panels with random text boxes or word bubbles. It’s so much fun, wildly inventive, completely unusual, and gives you the odd sensation that you’re both reading and watching a movie at the same time. I never read superhero comics as a kid, but I read a lot of Archie, and this movie made me want to run home and start reading my old comics again.

The next most magnificent part of this movie is the main character, Miles Morales. He is an Afro-Latino teen in Brooklyn who has been granted admission to a highly competitive school where he will board during the weekdays. He doesn’t want to leave his friends and family behind, begging to stay in his usual public school, but his parents gently insist that he take full advantage of this opportunity. This is not the typical New York City kid we see in the movies. Miles and his family are like thousands of families who live in this city and yet we usually never see them on screen - instead we only hear about affluent NYC millionaires or poor people facing impossible struggle. But Miles, with his cop father and nurse mother, is a solidly middle-class and well-adjusted kid. Well, until he gets bitten by a radioactive spider, of course.

I won’t go into details about the plot of this movie because it is the twisty superhero craziness you would expect from a Marvel enterprise. Every frame is gorgeously rendered and there are jokes galore because again, a Marvel movie will never take itself too seriously. And prepare yourself for extreme complications because you are going to meet Spider-characters across the comic book canon, which includes some really zany interpretations of Spider-Man that I had never heard of before. It worked, but it was definitely weird. And glorious.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a fascinating movie and heralds a whole new frontier in animation and film-making. It has an excellent soundtrack, perfect voice acting, is lively, colorful, and So. Much. Fun. We finally got a black Spider-Man and it was worth it.