Sony Pictures
Writers/producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 2018 Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is one of modern superhero cinema’s genuine triumphs, this despite the fact that it helped make the multiverse—that dreaded concept which allows for endless reiterations, revisions and reboots—a mainstream staple.
There are even more Spider-men, women, children and animals to be found in its follow-up, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which hits theaters June 2, an overstuffed saga that boasts a heart and flair that only a few of its genre brethren can match. Sending its Brooklyn-native wall-crawler Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) on an odyssey to multiple mirror-image Earths, it’s a smashing success which proves that a surplus of web-slingers—and artistic imagination—is never enough.
Setting a new benchmark for diverse, agile, breathtaking animation, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is as striking as non-live-action films come, mixing and matching patterns and palettes to create an awe-inspiringly expressive tapestry of designs and hues. Its models ranging from CGI-traditional to hand-drawn sketchy to cut-and-paste raggedy, directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson’s sequel is a multifaceted wonder, and that also goes for the interaction between its foreground figures and background environments, which vary in fashion, vibrancy and focus, frequently assuming a form (say, a dripping watercolor technique for a moving conversation) to match the tenor of a given scene.