Ben(ch)’s review published on Letterboxd:
Simply marvellous. Second viewing now and I've grown all the wiser on just how endearing this film is on a broad range of technical, narrative and visceral levels. The superhero genre--a generation-defining industry now, utterly impossible to ignore on any consumable wavelength--has, for the most part, been nothing more than a disappointment to me. Growing up one lonely, nervous Jewish kid in a small Canadian town was only survivable because of comic books. They protected me. They guided my imagination. It was in the safe-haven of artists like Watterson, Breathed, Smith, Ditko, Maguire, Miller, Kane and Moore that I found real refuge from a world I neither understood nor was brave enough to face. In the comfort of a few dozen pages of standard offset was my own private landscape of caped-crusaders, vivid colour and villains. I coveted this space greedily. Yet save for Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man films or Burton's Batman Returns it always felt that the film industry neutered what was so special to the mechanics of the comic-book form itself; it's synthesis of visual languages, framing, history, pulse. Hollywood just didn't really get it, I whispered to myself as a barrage of Marvel titles swept like wildfire across the earth's movie theatres. Hollywood didn't understand that comic books aren't just storyboards designed to be purchased and retrofitted for the silver screen...they are their own art, a living organism. My frustrations grew as more and more movies were produced, as that little world I naively thought was mine alone ballooned into a media empire beyond recognition. I grew distant from Marvel, DC, Darkhorse. Another childhood passion teetered and fell. Passions fade.
Anyways, wait a few years and I grow up (marginally). Old wounds are replaced by rougher layers of skin. One learns to let things go. I get into different comics, literature, poetry and visual art. Clowes, Tomine, Seth, Julie Doucet, DeForge, Beaton, Mizuki. These names became my new graphic-novelists' refuge, held this time with the added layer of a kind of aesthetic distanciation, a coldness, unknown to my younger self. Walls are built and maintained in adulthood to a level many of us are unable or unwilling to admit, sometimes to protect ourselves from a vulnerability just lying beneath the surface, other times merely to make everyday a little easier to face. Whatever the reason, our heroes retire and die. Our obsessions fall and get replaced. Yeah, I went to university. I put my paperbacks in a cardboard box.
Cue December 1st, 2018 when a few friends and I go to see Persichetti et al's Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. Time nearly stopped, I kid you not. It was as if someone had made a film for the child I thought had long since vacated my soul. Thrilling. Emotional. Silly. I cried--a lot. I laughed. All the dullness I felt had been thrown out to the public by the blatant Disneyfication of previous Marvel titles evaporated completely. My inner optimist even made a comeback, however briefly. How!? I'd finally found something rivalling Dudok De Wit, Basinski, Takahata, Buchard, Kon, Avery and Park combined--all set, unbelievable so, in the weird world of near-technicolor pop-comix no less. Wild stuff. Wild. Call me crazy but this may just be the best superhero film ever made. It's a revelation of sight and sound, something that feels equally new and indebted to the works from which it draw its strength. Ever thing in its right place. Tidy and warm and startling at once. And it all comes from a perfect amalgamation of disparate (but necessary) aesthetic elements.
Miles Morales is an incredible re-imagination of the Parker legacy--and completely free from it too, unique and brilliant and harrowing all on his own. There's narrative consequence in ItSV on a level even Will Eisner or Moebius would admire; family strife, moral responsibility and ambiguity standing at odds, architectural feats of design, colour pallets new and old, digital and hand-made intertwining, dancing, floating off the screen like nuclear fusion. Here we witness the building-blocks of a super-hero mythos and mechanics formed in concert with the iconography of the comic-book itself made to such a degree of technical prowess Lasseter blushed and shed a tear. The molding of pop-art, the history of the panel and its many configurations, thought balloons, kabooms, pows, Kirby krackles, half-tones and Ben-Day dots and motion-lines....Wow! Lily Tomlin? Mulaney? Johnson? Shrieber? This cast was hewn from gold, I tell you. I stood amazed. I stand amazed. My love returns to me, more beautiful and uncomprimised as ever before. And all this from the office of Sony international no less...the cinematic butchers of the previous Spider-Verses themselves. The same monopolists who bought and hoarded Lee and Ditko's masterworks without so much as a 'thank-you' for decades.
Thanks Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, animators, directors and art designers alike. You've done good here. Real good. Sara Pechelli should get three hurras for her influence. And Romita jr, Rodriguez too. And, as needs endless repeating, Ditko. "Shy" Steve Ditko. May you rest in peace, brother. May your panels outlive you. Thank you all for rebirthing my unabashed love for the potential of comics and their legacy to boot. Hopefully this movie taught the corporate higher-ups--if they even watched this movie in the first place outside of eyeing ticket sales and merchandizing revenue--that animation such as this is the one true translation of the great Marvel way. Stan, if you're up there, know I bow before you no less than ever. You wiry old salesman. Excelsior! Excellent! All is forgiven before humanity's great art. For those of you re-watching this like me, take notice of the image rate between characters and how they move through the world. It's fascinating to note how Peter B. Parker and Miles swing through the air in different frame rates, just to show the audience how their powers differ in skill. It's these small details we cherish. This movie is full of small details.
