INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE ALIEN:
Take every Spider-thing available and throw them into one animated Spider-Verse. Chaos? Or genius?
Here we go again’ is how I commenced the review of The Fifth Element because that was yet another new format of the same movie. But ‘here we go again’ is appropriate for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for a very different reason. This time because, smack-bang between the first and second instalments of the ‘third’ Spider-Man movie series since 2002, we have not the fourth new Spider-man, but the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth new Spider-people. ‘People’, because a couple of them are female and one is, well, something else entirely.
And despite Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse being animated, the wisdom of the crowd — an average of 8.5/10 from 210,000 voters on IMDB — judges this one to be the best of the lot. I gave it 9/10.
In a sense, it’s the same old story. A young, talented individual (Miles Morales, voiced by Shameik Moore) is reluctantly mentored by a jaded but skilled elder (Peter B. Parker, voiced by Jake Johnson). So common is the story that the very first movie role played by one of the other voice stars, Hailee Steinfeld, was in the Coen brothers’ ‘True Grit’, a not dissimilar story arch itself.
But there’s magic in this rendition. Part of the magic is no doubt due to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. These two have become so familiar for their ability to lift stories beyond what you’d expect —think 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie — that they are elevated in the promotional literature above even the directors. In fact Lord came up with the story and co-wrote the screenplay, as well as produced, while Miller merely produced.
Part of the magic is the cleverness of the story, bringing together very different Spiderpeople from alternate universes. At least three of those universes are animated — noir comic books, Japanese manga and 2D Hollywood of the 1950s. And the characters remain true to their origins.
And part of the magic is the astonishing animation. It’s not 2D. It’s not 3D (e.g. Pixar-like). It’s not anime. It’s not comic book. It’s everything. Call-backs to all the techniques? Perhaps. Whatever, it’s visually fascinating. Much of it has the slight misalignment between borders and fill colours, as per the Sunday newspaper comics of old. These elements are used to indicate out-of focus elements. There are magazine-style shading dots. Spider-Ham is a flat, boldy-coloured 1950s-style character, placed in an environment that occasionally suggests near Pixar-style rendering.
What else? How about the slow frame-rate animation. A lot of elements are animated at 12 frames per second. That is, a character’s hand or face remains static through two frames, while a panning background might proceed along at the full 24 frames per second. That’s ubiquitous in Japanese Anime and 1940s and 1950s Disney. But I’ve always assumed its use in those instances was to save labour. For most of them every frame was hand drawn.
But surely this movie was computer generated. The use
of slow frame rates for various elements must have been intentional. Indeed, it would have complicated matters: moving some elements every second frame while moving others every frame. That almost-subliminal staccato was intended. So when you’re watching, switch off the motion smoothing in your display device.
Which brings us to picture quality. Oh. Wow. Bold, deep, sharp, detailed. All the work that the movie creators put into the animation is conveyed to absolute perfection. Given the nature of modern video compression systems — they compress across time in addition to within each frame — animation is a relatively easy ask. Especially when a lot of frames have repeated elements. Yet according to a Panasonic UltraHD Blu-ray player, the video typically ran at between 45 and 60Mbps, but peaked occasionally well north of 100Mbps.
I compared a few random scenes between the Blu-ray and UltraHD Blu-ray and the latter was indeed sharper (see comparison pics). Not dramatically so, but I did get an overall sense of, well, a more complete picture with the latter. It also had rather deeper colours, although that may have been in part due to the HDR mode my LG OLED TV switched to in response to the signal.
The sound, oh, the sound. The UltraHD Blu-ray has Dolby Atmos. The standard Blu-ray has DTS-HD Master Audio. Either way, it’s some of the best sound available, whether it be enormous dollops and incredibly deep and powerful bass, or a surround field that uses every available direction.
The UltraHD Blu-ray version also includes a Loonie Tunes-like cartoon featuring ‘Spider-Ham’, although this is delivered with stereo sound and in 1080p SDR. (I was guessing The Simpson’s creators own the copyright to ‘Spider-Pig’, but it turns out that ‘Spider-Ham’ comics pre-date The Simpsons.) There are plenty of extras on the included standard Blu-ray disc including nearly an hour’s worth of featurettes and ‘Spider-Ham’ again. One of the featurettes is ‘The SpiderVerse Super Fan Easter Egg Challenge’. Want to know all those call-backs and references that you may have missed? This featurettes will fill you in on a bunch of them.
Finally, the standard Blu-ray features the ‘Alt Universe’ cut of the movie, more than 20 minutes longer with seamless branching to include a number of sketch scenes which change the movie. It opens with that ‘Spider-Ham’ animation, which tells us what Spider-Ham was up to before entering the main movie. There are quite a few divergences from the theatrical plot. It’s a whole two-anda-bit more hours of entertainment.