This was a very pleasant visual experience, to say the least. "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," an animated take on the Marvel superhero, is the closest a movie has coming to making a comic book spring to life. The film tells the coming-of-age story of Miles Morales (voiced by Sameik Moore), teenage son to an African-American cop and a Puerto Rican nurse, who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and...well you know the set-up.
"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" uses a meta-universe of alternative Spideys to pull off an unexpected deft and humane comic touch. However, if the story is what I would qualify as "OK," the visuals are the real sell, the eye-popping frames, concocted by directors Peter Ramsey, Robert Persichetti Jr, and Rodney Rothman and producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, has the feel of stepping inside a page-turner.
At the end of the day, and no disrespect to the high-leveled CGI in MCU and DCEU films, animation is the best medium with which to honor the style of the comic book art. These aforementioned creatives have adapted 70-year-old techniques seen in comic artwork into the film's visual language. To capture the feel of comic book animation they had to concoct comic book techniques such as "line work, painting and dots to make it look like it was created by hand, which has been described by them as "a living painting".This was achieved by artists taking rendered frames from the CGI animators and working on top of them in 2D. Lord described this style of animation as "totally revolutionary" and it is. Prepare to be impressed by this visually groundbreaking work. I can't wait to see it again. [B]