With its release in 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, launched the animation world into an exploration of experimentation and style.  

As the power of animation has grown, studios have put much of their focus on perfecting realism. More accurately, capturing the likeness of humans. 

No one wants a stiff, uncanny valley character—unless that’s what they’re going for, of course. But even then, it takes careful observation to properly convey the way a human body moves. Movement and expression are incredibly important in making a drawing seem as alive as possible. From facial expressions, to the way they hold their shoulders, to the way a person walks, all people have little quirks that give them definition. 

In order to try and replicate this image, studios looked towards the most obvious reference: people themselves.  

Early signs of this can be seen with use of techniques such as rotoscoping, where animators trace over videos, frame by frame, of real people in order to understand the way the humans move. An example of this can be witnessed in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, as many of the scenes were composed using this method. 

But as technology improved, so did standards. Once studios perfected the movement, they shifted their attention towards the graphics themselves. When many older animations were released, the animation quality was standard for its time. Yet now, watching them back reveals all their inaccuracies and oddities when compared to the vast improvement shown in the movies that have followed throughout the years.  

What made the difference? The animators’ growing mastery over realism. Along with access to super computers powerful enough to render that much detail. 

 And yet, regardless of the decades of work put towards looking as realistic as possible, Into the Spider-Verse was released with all its unusual quirks—and people loved it. 

At its opening, it made $35,363,376. That number has racked up to $375.5 million. It has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, along with a 93% audience score. If that wasn’t convincing enough, the film also won the 2019 Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film and the 2019 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, along with dozens of other awards and nominations.  

The 2018 hit incorporated charming elements like comic-book textures, uncommon frame rates, varying art styles, and vibrant colors. The perfect mixture of both 2D and 3D. It brought something to animation that the field hadn’t seen in a while: experimentation. 

In a world obsessed with realism, seeing something so utterly cartoonish was a breath of fresh air for many. 

Prior to its release, someone would be hard pressed to find any modern movie quite like it. Nowadays, we can see the effect it’s had in media like Arcane, The Bad Guys, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Co-Director Bob Persichetti of the Miles Morales film was also initially set to work on the newest Puss in Boots movie, before he was replaced by Joel Crawford.  

When asked in an interview with The Verge, Persichetti revealed some behind-the-scenes details on the process of creating this new look. 

           How do we deal with all the things that have been created in CG animation over the last 20 years?’ All these algorithms do all this stuff naturally. They all depend on certain things. We took a lot of those certain things out. We had to have the people write new code and come up with new theories on how to make cloth move, all this in-the-weeds stuff that always prevented a new style. The existing algorithms took a really long time to develop, so nobody in animation had the ability to then say, ‘We’re not going to use that stuff you spent all that time and money developing. 

VFX supervisor, Danny Dimian, and his team of talented individuals can be thanked for the brilliant way these numerous techniques were brought together. In an interview with Vulture, he said, “Creatively, the biggest challenge was to make sure that all these different ideas we were trying fit together. We wanted to break the mold — ‘break the machine,’ we would say… We want to be out-there, but not so crazy or disjointed that it takes away from the story.” 

Rather than pursue realism, Into the Spider-Verse encouraged expression and stylization. It wanted to create something new. 

Persichetti said it best: “When we finally got to a place where you were looking at something that you thought the style was really cool, but you were able to look past it and get straight to the performance and the emotion, that was the hallelujah moment: ‘“Oh, it’s actually going to work!’” 

 And work it did. This new age of animation lives on not just through other recent films, but also within the Spider-Verse itself with the announcement of its sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.   

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has grown to be more than just another movie. For the world of animation, it has been refreshing and innovative. In terms of being the thing this field has needed, some may dare call it… a hero.