Given that we get a handful of Marvel films every year-and we’ve certainly had no shortage of movies featuring Spider-Man among them, either as a main character or as part of an assembled ensemble-the idea of yet another might sound like overkill or worse: a shameless cash grab.īut “Into the Spider-Verse” is after something different, both in its storytelling and in its stakes.

The way they play with tone, form and texture is constantly inventive and giddily alive. It would seem like an impossible feat, but somehow, directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman have breathed thrilling new life into the comic book movie. And that’s not just because it features a wisecracking pig in a Spider-Man get-up named Peter Porker, the kind of character you might conjure in your subconscious after eating too much barbecue and taking a shot of Nyquil before bed. As rooted in a vividly specific, recognizable New York as it is, and as closely as it hews to comic-book imagery and structure within its animated format as it does, “Spider-Verse” has a wonderfully trippy, dreamlike quality about it. It’s only fitting that my kid would be thinking about “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” as he was drifting off to sleep. I’d been thinking about how much I wanted to revisit the film for days after the screening we’d attended, myself-not only because it’s such a pure blast of creative joy, but also because there’s so much going on that a viewer couldn’t possibly catch it all the first time around. “Mom, can we go see ‘Into the Spider-Verse,’ again?” my nine-year-old son asked me as I was tucking him in to bed the other night.

Spider verse