Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Review

Sony's team threw out the smooth-CG default and rebuilt the medium: hand-drawn linework laid over three-dimensional models, halftone dots and chromatic aberration baked into the render, panel borders and thought balloons intruding on the frame. Most radically, Miles animates on twos while the experienced heroes animate on ones, so the audience feels his hesitation before anyone states it, then feels him sync up as he learns. That is a character arc expressed through frame rate, which nobody had done.

The leap of faith, city inverted overhead as he falls upward, is the payoff. Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman's script is fast and genuinely funny, giving Jake Johnson's shabby Peter B. Parker real middle-aged sadness and Nicolas Cage a monochrome bit that never overstays. The plot itself is standard collider-must-be-stopped business and the villain roster is crowded. But the film's argument that anyone can wear the mask is delivered by its form as much as its dialogue, which is the highest compliment animation can earn.