SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE is one of the best superhero movies I’ve ever seen, and one of the most gorgeous American animated movies of this era, perfectly distilling the mythic ridiculousness of superhero comics into something cohesively moving, thrilling, and funny. No coincidence that this invigorating starburst of creative energy, lending new life to a tired and bloated genre, is the first time the cinematic Spider-Man gets to be an Afro-Latino teenager, within a meta-textual framework that explicitly acknowledges that this shouldn’t be as hard as the world makes it–superhero comics, mythology, are boundless, and needn’t be bound by our own bigotries, and should, indeed, fight back against them. It’s also evidence that CGI animation can be fascinatingly new even in this hyper-stimulated age, if it’s conceived with grace, emotion and imagination. I was blown away. Watch this on the biggest screen you can find. I’m buzzing from it.
Here’s a one of my favourite film critics, Walter Chaw, telling it like I saw it: ‘More than beautiful, it’s breathtaking. More than kinetic, it’s alive. And more than just alive, it’s seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett’s quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It’s a manifestation of optimism.’ Read the rest of his piece at Film Freak Central–it articulates exactly why I loved this film, and why it’s as important a milestone as Black Panther and Wonder Woman.
