Into the Spider-Verse: in Pseudo 3-D

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is possibly the most comic-book-looking animated film I've ever seen. And it was able to pull together nearly all past versions of Spider-man into one movie.

Somehow, each Spider-man who has ever existed, or been dreamt up, exists in his or her own universe. (Sorry -- I just can't misuse the word "dimension" as most shows do. The proper word is "universe.") After Kingpin opens a portal to these other universes, they all clash together.

In one sense, this is yet another movie like TRON, where the overall idea is ludicrous, but when put together in an enjoyable way--a good plot, good humor, and good action--no one seems to notice the ludicrousness. You want to see how good writers can effectively fit in a looney-tunes talking spider pig? Then watch this film.

The animation is awesome. It seemed like it was constantly switching between different styles, and I couldn't find any patterns, but it all seemed to work. Sometimes the animation was an intentional low bit rate, helping to create a jerky comic-book action feel. Sometimes there was an out-of-focus double vision to emulate 3-D without the glasses -- sometimes with red-blue borders, and sometimes more like today's polarized 3-D look. (In fact, during the viewing, I thought the theater had accidentally shown us the 3-D version without the glasses. I only found out later through research that the pseudo 3-D effect was intentional, even in the 2-D version.)

Sometimes the animation looked like the old 4-color dot matrix comics. Other times it was a newer more modern type of animation with computer-aided 3-D shading and the like. And often we got to see word bubbles with some humorous variations.

Overall, it was fun for the whole family. I saw it in the theater, but it's out now on disc and streaming. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it. I'll probably be watching it again sometime soon to catch what I missed the first time.