Anna Daniels
Into the Spider-Verse’s three directors — Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman — were dedicated to taking their film in a direction neither animated or live-action superhero features had gone before. To do that, they spent four years making the film, with an animation staff that at one point featured as many as 177 people — 107 more than Pixar’s Monsters University and 150 more than Disney’s original Toy Story (via Business Insider). Animating just a second of footage took a week — one-fourth of the typical production rate — which was a result of the team’s decision to toss out most of the animation process pipeline that has guided the medium for decades.
The film’s team borrowed from older animation styles and combined them with modern ones, as well as comic art techniques to create the Spider-Verse. Two-dimensional ink lines were layered over three-dimensional art, comic panels made out of webbing served as background, and comics’ onomatopoeia — or words that visually represent action like motion and sounds — crashed onto the screen. The staff animated not just in ones, but in twos — making characters’ movements more pronounced and drawn out, emphasizing a character’s physicality and personality. “If you freeze any part of the movie at any time, it will look like an illustration with hand-drawn touches and all,” co-writer and co-producer Phil Lord told Business Insider.
But Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse doesn’t just look distinctly different from other animated movies because it could. It’s because the film’s directors knew Miles is so unlike any leading and live-action MCU Spidey that had come before him, and that should be reflected in the visual style of the movie centered around him. “That made it doubly important for the film to look new, so viewers would feel like they’re seeing Spider-Man for the first time,” Ramsey told The New York Times. “We couldn’t rest on the conventions of animated films as we’ve known them.”
Written by: Looper
