The Spider-Verse
Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Miles Morales’s first two films, and how Sony Pictures Imageworks rebuilt computer animation around the look of a printed comic, then split that look into six worlds for the sequel.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse begins with Peter Parker (Chris Pine) offering to go through his origin one last time, over a run of comic-book panels, a minute and nineteen seconds into the film. In 2023, at the same timecode, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse finds Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) drumming for her band, the Mary Janes, and telling us, “Let’s do things differently this time.”Both times come from the home-video copies logged on clip.cafe. Streaming versions can run a few seconds either way.
I take the second line as an answer to the first, and as a fair description of what the sequel does to the look of the first film. Into made computer animation behave like a printed comic. It is animated mostly on twos and inked partly by a machine that learned from artists. Its shading is halftone dots and hatching, and wherever a lens would go out of focus, its colours slip out of register like a misprinted page. Phil Lord, who co-wrote and co-produced both films, has put the difference simply: “The first film had one animation style that dominates the movie. This movie has six.” An animated film has no camera, but it still has to decide everything a camera decides, and for the sequel Sony Pictures Imageworks had to work most of it out again. That is what I want to write about.
The Premise
Brooklyn. Earth-1610.
Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is a Brooklyn teenager trying to live up to his father, Jefferson Davis (Brian Tyree Henry), a police officer who considers Spider-Man a menace. At the start of the film he is singing along to “Sunflower” in his bedroom. His uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali) takes him to paint graffiti in an abandoned subway station, and there he is bitten by a radioactive spider.
Back at the station he finds a super-collider built by Kingpin (Liev Schreiber), who wants to reach parallel universes and bring back other versions of his dead wife and son. Spider-Man, badly hurt in the fight there, gives Miles a drive meant to disable the machine, and Miles watches Kingpin kill him.
Miles breaks the drive, and at Peter’s grave he meets a Peter Parker from another dimension, Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), older, disheveled and jaded. The two of them break into Alchemax for the data to build a new drive, and its head, Olivia Octavius (Kathryn Hahn), turns out to be Doctor Octopus.Doc Ock’s arms were designed as soft-robotic octopus tentacles, drawing on the women scientists who design colliders and on the documentary Particle Fever. She chases them into a forest, where Gwen, a Spider-Woman from yet another dimension, rescues them. At Aunt May’s house they find Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn) and Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), who also came through the collider and are also decaying.
Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman directed it from a screenplay by Lord and Rothman, with Justin K. Thompson as production designer and music by Daniel Pemberton. Imageworks animated it for Sony Pictures Animation, mostly at its Vancouver headquarters. It cost $90 million and opened in the United States on 14 December 2018.
Production
Lord and Christopher Miller came up with the project in 2014. Thompson remembers the brief they gave him as a single line: “Make something I’ve never seen before.” Danny Dimian, the visual effects supervisor at Imageworks, says the two of them wanted something they had never seen, or couldn’t work out how it was made. His motto was “If it’s not broke, break it,” and the studio changed steps of its usual pipeline even where there was no obvious reason to.The first animation test was directed by Alberto Mielgo, who was hired early to set the visual language. Only four shots of it were finished. Sony let him go, reportedly over artistic differences, and he is credited as visual consultant. Miller says the question was whether a film could feel like walking inside a comic book. Lord says that when Sony’s marketing department asked them to name the style, they couldn’t.
Persichetti said in 2018 that it had taken about a year of trial and error to get ten seconds of footage looking right. A typical animated feature produces about four seconds of footage per animator per week. Into managed about one, across two to three times the usual number of shots. The animation crew grew from around sixty to a peak of 177, the largest Imageworks had used on a film, and by Persichetti’s account the last shot was approved about a month before release.
Nearly every decision in the look is a substitution. The film takes something a computer-animation camera does by default and puts something drawn or printed in its place.
Frame Rate
Film runs at 24 frames a second. A shot is on ones when every frame is a new drawing, and on twos when each drawing is held for two frames, which gives twelve new images a second. Conventional computer animation runs on ones. Into was animated mostly on twos, with some ones and threes. The team tested ones, and Dimian says what they disliked was the smoothness. The producers called the stepped result crunchy.
Josh Beveridge, who led the character animation, says twos gave the film a pop-art clarity, and that the team broke down to ones when it needed to. Twos, he adds, never meant mathematically every other frame: it was usually twelve frames a second, on a fluid scale that changed from shot to shot. Cloth simulation needs continuous motion, so for the wardrobe the team added a ghost in-between frame that the audience never sees.
The clearest use of it comes in the forest, with Doctor Octopus behind them. Miles swings at twelve frames a second, to show his inexperience, and Peter B. swings beside him at twenty-four. You feel the gap before you can name it. Peter B. moves like a man who has done this for years, and Miles looks as if he is being drawn half a beat behind himself.
There is no motion blur either. “There’s not one frame of motion blur anywhere in the movie,” Persichetti has said. Speed is drawn instead, with smears, motion lines and multiples, and in fast pans with something like a rolling shutter, as in the runaway-train sequence with Miles stuck to Peter B. Beveridge’s team used a tool called the pose stamp, a stripped-down copy of a character’s rig, to smear a figure across space and fill the gaps with extra limbs. Even the effects match. Explosions, sparks, smoke and flames were drawn by hand, often on twos, and the 2D effects artist Alex Redfish supplied a layered library of them that could be reused.
Line and Print
Thompson says the printing imperfections of four-colour comics, the Ben-Day dots, the offsets and the lines drawn on faces, would actually exist in Miles’s world, and he wanted the film treated as if it were told by someone inside one of those comics. The rest of the look follows from that.
Because the film was released in stereo 3D, its ink lines had to be 3D geometry: form lines built into the models, drawn lines describing form, and lines for acting and emotion, which animators control through the rig in place of sculpted wrinkles. “A simple line can exaggerate an emotion, clarify an action, or describe a form,” Beveridge says. The Inkline tools put drawn lines in space around a character, and their thickness was set at render time, in lighting. Pav Grochola’s effects team trained a machine-learning model inside Houdini on turntables drawn by artists, about 600 frames per character, to predict a first pass of the lines from the camera angle and the expression. Artists nudged the lines into place, and their corrections trained the next round. I like that the machine was only trusted with the rough pass.
One rule was to avoid smooth gradations. Tone and shadow are carried by halftone dots, Ben-Day dots and cross-hatching, mostly added in compositing from render passes. Even the glows in the train station are sprinkled halftone, and characters walk through screentone that behaves like light, with separate screens for highlights, half tones and shadows, as in comic printing.
The substitute for depth of field is the decision I love most. “What if the camera didn’t de-focus like a lens?” Dimian asks. A lens softens whatever is away from the plane of focus. Into splits the colour channels instead and offsets them by depth, the way the plates of a misprinted comic drift out of register. Dimian says the result isn’t a blur and isn’t out of focus, though it reads as out of focus. The tool built for it, ChromaShifter, found a second job: the lead compositor, Geeta Basantani, says that feeding it motion vectors in place of depth gave the film its motion trails. The compositors built more than 25 tools of their own in Foundry’s Nuke, and Foundry calls Into by far the most compositing-heavy animated feature Imageworks had made.
Each guest Spider-Person brings their own printing. Gwen comes from Jason Latour and Robbi Rodriguez’s dry-brush covers, in pink, mint green and purple. Spider-Man Noir comes from late-1930s pulp and Will Eisner, with bigger Ben-Day dots, rougher lines and no colour, because, as Thompson tells it, Noir couldn’t even understand the concept. Spider-Ham comes from Mad magazine, and Peni Parker from manga. She has no facial geometry, and her animation is converted into a flat, shaded decal.
All of them were placed in one physical space under the same light sources, which is why the scene at Aunt May’s works for me. A black-and-white pulp hero, a flat figure out of manga and a cartoon pig stand in the same room as Miles, and the room holds together.
The film borrows the grammar of the page as well. Miles’s thoughts appear as caption boxes that move with the camera. “It’s more how those thought bubbles move than what they say,” Rothman says. The frame breaks into panels, which Beveridge describes as frames in frames that move like comics.
The Leap
Thompson made Miles’s Brooklyn naturalistic. “From the very minute he meets Peter Parker,” he says, “the scale of everything gets bigger,” and as the Spider-Verse comes into Miles’s life the colour grows brighter and more saturated and the contrast rises. For shots of Miles falling, the layout artists tilted the buildings, scaled them to five to eight times their height in the New York set, and ringed them around him.
Miles discovers that Uncle Aaron is the Prowler, redesigned as a dark, almost omnipresent wraith in purple. When Miles unmasks, Aaron won’t kill his nephew, and Kingpin shoots him. Aaron dies in Miles’s arms, and Jefferson arrives believing the new Spider-Man killed his brother. Peter B. webs Miles up in his dorm room and the others go on without him, and Jefferson apologises to his son through the door. Miles masters his powers, breaks free, and makes his own suit with Aunt May’s help.
Then he jumps. In a red-and-black suit with a spray-painted logo, Miles drops from a skyscraper, and the shot is turned upside down, so that the fall reads as a rise. “What’s Up Danger”, by Blackway and Black Caviar, plays over it and fades into Pemberton’s score, and Pemberton says he wanted the moment to tie together all the Miles themes you’d heard.Pemberton recorded orchestra, pressed it to vinyl and had a scratch DJ scratch it back into the score. I have found only one source for this, a Moviefone piece from December 2018. According to Michael Lasker, then a CG supervisor, these were the first shots finalled on the film, and they went into the first teaser.
I think it is the best single image in either film. Into spends an hour and a half bending its picture to show how things feel, and here it simply turns the frame over.
The climax lets everything in. Kingpin starts the collider, other dimensions bleed into Brooklyn, and the battle fills with Kirby dots, the energy bubbles named after Jack Kirby, which Dimian says are also an allusion to particles breaking down across the multiverse. For the portals, Imageworks built a camera array that renders seven angles at once, each in a different style, and for the glitches it rendered the same animation through several cameras with different treatments, for a fragmented, cubist look.
Miles sends the others home and, with his father watching, throws Kingpin into the collider’s kill switch. The film ends with him telling his own origin, starting the way everyone else’s did, one last time, and arriving where Mary Jane’s eulogy for Peter pointed: “Anyone can wear the mask.”
It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the first winner from outside Disney and Pixar since Rango (2011), and Peter Ramsey became the first Black filmmaker to win that award. It also won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and all seven Annie Awards it was nominated for.
The Sequel
Across the Spider-Verse was directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Thompson, and written by Lord, Miller and Dave Callaham, with Patrick O’Keefe as production designer. It runs 140 minutes, reported as the longest animated film from an American studio, and opened in the US on 2 June 2023. On a reported budget of $150 million it made about $690.8 million worldwide and became Sony Pictures Animation’s highest-grossing film. About 1,000 people worked on it at Imageworks, which Lord and Miller called the largest crew on any animated film.
Imageworks created a new department, Look of Picture, and Bret St. Clair, who supervised the look, says he spent 80 per cent of his time building tools. There was a dedicated inking team, the first on a CG animated film that Lasker, now the visual effects supervisor, had heard of, and its line tool, Kismet, helped generate about a hundred million lines. Other tools placed tens of thousands of brushstrokes in 3D space, mixed colour subtractively, as paint does, and simulated watercolour, oil and acrylic with Escape Motions’ Rebelle.The LEGO sequence was animated by Preston Mutanga, a 14-year-old in Toronto who taught himself Blender and remade the trailer shot for shot in LEGO. After Lord and Miller saw it, the producer Christina Steinberg offered him the sequence. His parents, wary, checked the offer with Patrick O’Keefe, and he did the work after school and through spring break.
Animation ran anywhere from ones to sixes. Alan Hawkins, head of character animation, says every animator was “basically an honorary DP on this film”. Lasker says each world needed its own way of handling depth of field, and that every aspect had to be reinvented. The editor, Michael Andrews, says any frame or angle could be split: “There’s no 16:9 in a comic book.” The first film had to invent one camera. The second needed one for every world.
That scale had a cost. In June 2023 Vulture quoted four anonymous artists who described heavy late revisions under Lord, including changes to fully rendered sequences the directors had already approved. The report said more than 100 artists left before the film was finished, and that months of idle time during layout in 2021 left a backlog that later meant weeks of more than 70 hours. Sony disputed it. Michelle Grady, Imageworks’ general manager, said revisions like these were normal (“It really does happen on every film”) and that about 90 per cent of the artists stayed to the end. The film was finished thirteen days before it opened. I can’t settle the argument from outside, but an essay about how good the film looks shouldn’t leave out what the people who made it say it cost them.
Earth-65
Earth-65. Gwen Stacy’s world.
The film opens in Gwen’s world. Her Peter Parker turned himself into the Lizard and died after their fight, and her father, Captain George Stacy (Shea Whigham), believes Spider-Woman killed him and is hunting her. Andrews says the team chose to open with her story, and the studio Buck animated the start of her backstory in a painterly style.
Earth-65 is wet-into-wet watercolour, and O’Keefe calls it “this mood ring that is driven completely by her own emotionality”. Its colours follow Gwen’s feelings, whatever the light is doing, and it pays homage to Latour and Rodriguez’s covers. St. Clair calls it the most intensive of the worlds. The brushes had to exist in 3D space so the painting would hold when the camera moved, and in early versions every stroke ran vertically. While developing the watercolour, O’Keefe says, the team made a chalk-pastel effect by accident.
The first fight is in a glitching version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, against a Renaissance Vulture drawn from Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks and made to look like parchment. He is translucent, so light scatters through him as it would through paper, and he carries about four layers of line work. Lasker calls him “probably one of the most complicated characters we have ever made”. Around him, a pack of Jeff Koons Balloon Dogs is rendered photoreal.
Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), Spider-Man 2099, and Jessica Drew (Issa Rae) arrive by portal. Then George corners Gwen, and she unmasks to him. He tries to arrest her, and she leaves with Miguel and Jess for the Spider-Society.
The watercolour is what makes the unmasking land for me. In a world whose colours run on Gwen’s feelings, the room her father is standing in is her mood, and he is caught inside it.
The Spot
Sixteen months after the collider was destroyed.
Back on Earth-1610, Miles arrives late to the celebration of his father’s promotion to police captain and is grounded. His new enemy is the Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a former Alchemax scientist covered in portals, who blames Miles for his mutation. On Miles’s Earth we first see him bungling the robbery of a bodega ATM.
He was designed as an unfinished sketch, with the blue construction lines of a drawing that hasn’t been inked, and his portals were meant to look like living ink spilled across it. O’Keefe calls him “the undoing of comic book language”: an illustration board coated in gesso, where the ink spots and the gesso chew away at each other, and when he moves fast, the artist is drawing fast. Hawkins says his holes bleed and disintegrate, so that as the film goes on he looks less like a dalmatian and more like someone with a growing disease. Imageworks ran Rebelle’s watercolour solver on him, so that, as Grochola puts it, he is constantly redrawn in natural media.
I think he is the best idea in the sequel. Into spent years making a computer image look finished and printed. The Spot is a drawing nobody finished, and every hole in him goes through the page.
Gwen comes to visit, and the two of them hang upside down beneath the dome of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, where she tells him that in every other universe Gwen Stacy falls for Spider-Man, and in every other universe it doesn’t end well. I read it as an echo of the leap: Brooklyn turned over again, with two of them in it this time.
Mumbattan and Earth-138
Earth-50101. Mumbattan.
Miles follows Gwen to Mumbattan, a blend of Mumbai and Manhattan, where he teams up with Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni) and Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya) against the Spot. Its look comes from the Indrajal Comics of 1970s India. Lord says they recreated a specific printing method and wanted to feel the tooth and texture of the paper, and St. Clair says the backgrounds dissolve into simple shapes with heavy outlines, as they would for an Indrajal artist with no time to paint every building. Pavitr’s costume, designed by Naveen Selvanathan, adapts the 1964 Spider-Man suit, drawing on Theyyam and Yakshagana dancers, temple architecture and henna patterns. When Miles saves Inspector Singh from a death he has foreseen, the city starts to collapse.
Hobie is Spider-Punk, from Earth-138, a cross between London and New York, and he looks like a 1970s punk zine. O’Keefe’s team used a Xerox machine, newspapers, rock magazines, masking tape, razor blades and staples. “We were literally taping things together and scanning them in,” he says.According to AWN, the team drew several broadsheets of fake London newspapers to get around licensing trouble, and the babies’ faces in a riot scene are photographs of crew members’ babies.
He is the only character animated at several frame rates at once. Hawkins says his jacket is on fours and his body on threes, with some parts on twos and his guitar sometimes on sixes, while everyone else is mostly on twos. In Into’s forest, the frame rate told you how long a character had been Spider-Man. Hobie’s tells you he won’t keep time with anyone, down to his own jacket.
Nueva York
Earth-928. Nueva York.
The Spider-Society’s headquarters is in Nueva York, drawn after Syd Mead and Ron Cobb. Thompson describes the city as having a cold, hard exterior with a lot of problems underneath, and its clean, brutalist design reflects Miguel’s controlling personality. It is drawn in marker-like strokes, and St. Clair points out that markers are transparent, so the layers have to go down in a very particular order. Miguel himself was groomed with brush strokes, using Imageworks’ hair tool, Fyber.
Here Miguel explains canon events, such as the death of a police captain close to Spider-Man, and Miles realises his father is fated to die. He refuses to let it happen. Miguel locks him up, Hobie helps him out, and the Society chases him. When Miguel corners him, he tells Miles that the spider that bit him came from Earth-42 and was never meant to bite him, which left Earth-42 without a Spider-Man. Miles answers that everyone keeps telling him how his story is supposed to go, and that he’s going to do his own thing. With Margo Kess’s help he gets away through the machine meant to send him home, and lands somewhere else.
This is where style and story become one argument. Miguel wants every story to go the same way, and his city is drawn to look controlled. O’Keefe says story drives style and style drives technology, and that they never made a choice because of their limitations. A boy who refuses his canon is the right hero for two films that refused a house style, and the friend who helps him out of his cell is the punk who won’t keep anyone’s time.
Earth-42. A world with no Spider-Man.
Earth-42 is ruled by the Sinister Six, and in O’Keefe’s description its Ben-Day dots have been replaced with spray paint. In the first film Aaron took Miles out to paint graffiti, and here is a whole world in Aaron’s medium, with Aaron alive in it and Miles’s father dead. This world’s Rio (Luna Lauren Vélez) doesn’t understand when Miles tells her he’s Spider-Man, Aaron restrains him, and this world’s Miles (Jharrel Jerome) introduces himself as the Prowler. On Earth-65, George quits the force rather than arrest his daughter, and Gwen gathers a team to go after Miles. The film stops there.
Across also won all seven of its Annie Awards, and lost the Oscar to Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.In April 2026 the Academy gave two Technical Achievement Awards to Imageworks artists for tools that, according to befores & afters, grew out of the Spider-Verse films: one to Bret St. Clair and Marc-André Davignon for brushing and patching tools, and one to Pav Grochola and Edmond Boulet-Gilly for the Superdraw and Kismet linework tools. The Academy’s citations don’t name a film. Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, directed by Persichetti and Thompson, is dated for 18 June 2027 in the US.
I keep going back to those two openings. Into tells its origin story again and again, once for each Spider-Person and each kind of comic, and ends by handing the mask to whoever is watching. Across promises to do things differently, and gives each world its own medium: watercolour for Gwen, Indrajal print for Pavitr, photocopies for Hobie, marker for Miguel, spray paint for Earth-42. Its villain is a drawing nobody finished, and its hero spends the last hour refusing to let anyone else draw his story for him. The first film taught a computer to print. The second taught it to paint, cut, tape and ink. I can’t think of two films that have done more to change what animation is allowed to look like.
Written by Reza
The Shot List