SPINNING OUT
THE FIRST FILM BROKE GROUND AND BLEW MINDS. NOW, WITH SPRAWLING SEQUEL SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE, THE TEAM WANT TO TAKE YOUR BRAIN TO ANOTHER DIMENSION IN FACT, MANY DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS...
WORDS TOM ELLEN
Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac) — Miguel O’Hara when in his civvies — clashes with Vulture (Jorma Taccone).
THE STEVE JOBS THEATER is packed. It’s summer 2018, and inside Pixar’s west California headquarters, the top minds at the legendary animation stable have paused work on their forthcoming feature Soul to take a gander at an offering from a rival studio. An early cut of Sony ’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse has been brought in by writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and no-one in the screening room knows quite what to expect.
“ When it comes to animation, Pixar can be a tough crowd,” laughs Kemp Powers, Soul’s co-director, and one of the three men now helming the Spider-Verse sequel. “So, it was pretty exciting to be sat in that packed auditorium, full of Pixar people, all collectively picking our jaws off the ground.”
Blending aesthetics from street art, graphic novels, manga and more, 2018’s Into The Spider-Verse was a revolutionary piece of animation, designed to make the viewer feel as if they ’d stepped directly into the pages of a comic book. At Pixar, the consensus was unanimous:
this was a game-changer. “That reaction was really gratifying. People came up afterwards saying, ‘ Well, you’ve just screwed us,’” laughs Miller now. “It was great to feel we were changing the way the industry looked at what animation could be.”
But there was substance, too, alongside the style. “[Lord and Miller] took every superhero trope and subverted it,” recalls Powers. “They took the piss [out of the genre] while also leaning into it. The film had heart, emotion, and it was incredibly funny. Like everyone else, I was floored.”
Unhinging the jawbones of such esteemed animators was only the beginning. When Into The Spider-Verse was released in December 2018, its story of web-slinging Afro-Latino teen Miles Morales mesmerised critics and crowds alike. It notched 97 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and bagged $384 million at the box office, against a $90 million budget. It wasn’t long before the awards came rolling in: a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and, ultimately, the Oscar for Best Animated Feature (a category traditionally dominated by Disney/Pixar fare).