How Spiderverse Changed Animation

who is the world's most popular superhero?

This seems like a pretty standard question and I want to find the answer to this not from some comic book nerd who knows every single story arc and development of any character made in the comic book world for the past decades, but from your parents or grandparents.

From where I am coming from superheroes weren't that of popular knowledge until the Marvel movies rose to power and Marvel and DC comics weren't in general our go-to entertainment options. In that case, you can assume that apart from mine or younger generations my parents and others would obviously wonder who the hell is Captian America or Iron man, But they all seem to know one guy, a guy who wears a weird mask and crawls and swings his way through his enemies and apparently their children are trying to get bitten by a spider for some related reasons.

And yes of all the people I have spoken to in my life have at least once wondered if they were the friendly neighborhood hero.

And all that being said, why is that?

Of all the superheroes, how spidey became the most popular one. And it comes with a lot of reasons. Being a superhero is one thing, but being a relatable superhero is a totally different thing. In the case of Spiderman, he is the most down-to-earth superhero ever. I have seen him being bullied by other students at school being late ordering a pizza delivery being irresponsible and making genuine mistakes and therefore the hero becomes more real to us.

But Spiderman has adapted to the screen a lot we got 3 different Spideys played by 3 different actors in 12 movies plus countless animated shows in the past two decades.

So how is it possible to make out one more fresh take from the character?

Let's look at animation for a second. It all started in 1995 when Pixar released its first computer animated Film 'Toy story'.

It blew up! everybody loved it. Since then they became the most influential studios in the animation industry with their stunning heartfelt films. Finding Nemo, Up, and Ratatouille are some of my favorites.

But with every new project, you can see how much they have developed in producing "photo-realistic" images on the screen. Even though it has a pinch of cartoonish in it. They very much resemble the real objects that we see on a day-to-day basis.

And as it turns out this became kind of a problem. With the success of Pixar, every major studio tried to make their animation looks more "Pixary". And because of all of their similarity, you can't even tell apart which studio produced which.

Until In 2018, Sony released a brand new Spiderman movie Spiderman Into the spider-verse with Phil Lord and Chris Miller at the helm. The ones who brought the acclaimed The Lego Movie and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs weren't much of a fan of that typical Pixar look. See we can't drop that much of a blaming cause if you are a producer making a 100ml plus investment on an animated film obviously, they are gonna go for the safe option. Even Spiderverse Animators were scared that if people are gonna like the visuals because they were taking too much risk. But it all changed as the Film dropped. Audiences and critics praised the film for their new take on animation and the risks that it took in bringing it to life.

It broke the shackles of some rules in animation that were considered monumental. Director's main focus was on bringing that quote-unquote 'Comic book effect'. Consider This if you randomly pause anywhere in the movie you can make out a comic book panel from it. They took most of the inspiration from the old Spiderman comics, features like halftoning, hatching, and line work all were lured in.

They were very much inspired by the illustrations of Jack Kirby.

His famous use of crackles to represent energy later came to be known as Kirby crackles. Has been seen to be used in lengths in the movie. As the film's VFX supervisor Danny Dimian puts it "We wanted to stay away from anything soft or did not look like it belonged in the illustrated world."

They didn't even use motion blur to implement focusing. When we see the movie we can notice every single object in the frame is sharp. So how can it make something stand out from the rest?

If you are a comic book reader you can in some of the colors of the image might be misplaced or jumped out from where it was supposed to be. This is a printing mistake that happens all the time. But what the animators did was adapt this mistake into a profit. They applied this effect to the elements in the background so the things that need to be focused stand out!

The Leap Of Faith Scene in the movie. I consider It one of the best scenes in animation history. And This one particular has an Incredible Illustratory feel. It looks so cool, and why is that?

well, let's look at the main features of the scene, It's buildings, right?

It's what gives the volume to the frame. But look how they look there is something weird going on for sure. When we look away from the actual shot and observe the 3d model from a different point of view we can view this weird alignment. In the real world this doesn't exist, obviously. But it does help in executing this cool and nuanced effect. The same can be said for the upside-down scene in the second movie.

When I read comics the first thing and important thing I notice is line work in the image, The bold and daring dark lines everywhere. It is some of the essential components that make comics what it is. But when it comes to real life or movies or realistic animation for that matter, we can never see them.

But when it comes to Spiderverse it is everywhere. It's amazing what a single stroke of a line can do to an emotion or an action. It brings a whole other depth to it. We have seen this effect executed in animation before in the old 2D animation from Disney, but never in 3D before.

Changing the frame rate of the image, using images with different frame rates at the same time, color smears, use of multiple images to avoid motion

blur, text boxes, and using text to visualize sound Like these there are countless amount of changes that Spiderverse has brought to their animation. After knowing all this it makes sense why the animators were scared of the risks they took.

But even with all these groundbreaking moves, I was still scared of the new movie especially when it was dealing with the multiverse, which apart from the last year's Oscar Everything Everywhere All At Once and The First Spiderverse movie others pretty much successfully screwed up the potential it had. It was the main problem that I had with No Way Home. Yes It was entertaining to see all my childhood heroes together on screen

But other than that and some nostalgic references there was nothing in the film. When you look at Spiderverse you see how much further it can go and the amount and types of characters that we see there, It even has a cat and dinosaur as spidermen. That is what is so cool about this Idea it has no barriers, That kind of potential was wasted with as just an excuse to bring 3 people on screen.

Anyway, The change Spiderverse brought to the animation world is really groundbreaking. Because of the animation and the style of animation has become a common talk among people. And for that reason, many studios have been rumored to do more experimental projects on works right now. This is to me is super exciting. The risks those animators took were totally worth it after all.