Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse surprised audiences. The film was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller who previously made The Lego Movie and the two 21 Jump Street films. It has a great cast with Jake Johnson as Peter Parker, Shameik Moore as Miles Morales, Hailee Steinfeld as Spider-Gwen, and Liev Schreiber as Kingpin.

The plot of the story centers on Miles Morales and his journey to becoming Spider-Man.  Along the way he meets “Spider-Men” from other dimensions who help him save his timeline along with saving their own. The plot is a bit confusing, but understandable if you pay close attention.  It was cool to see Miles Morales on screen for the first time and to see multiple dimensions/ timelines.

The animation was extremely different, it was very smooth but felt like it was missing a frame, so at the same time, it was choppy. It was a mix of computer graphics and hand-drawn animation. It took an animator a week to work on one second of animation on this film. In contrast, it would take an animator a week to work on four seconds of animation in a standard animation film.

The characters were great but I felt they could’ve been better. I wasn’t a huge fan of Peni Parker and Spider-Ham, but as the movie went on, I got used to them. The characters were unique and fun to have on screen but out of all of the “spider-men” characters out there, I would’ve chosen someone else. I was a huge fan of the way they portrayed Peter Parker, he felt realistic compared to other Peter Parker portrayals. We’ve seen Spider-Man films when they were still relatively new to the super-hero, this was Spider-Man later on during his prime years.

The soundtrack was incredible, the songs were catchy. Who can go wrong with a little Post Malone? I thought it was great that the song “Sunflower” played a major part in the movie rather just being used for promotional material.

I don’t consider this a spoiler but there was a scene with Stan Lee that I felt was extremely important and summarized Spider-Man or any other heroes up pretty well. In this scene, Miles Morales goes to a store to buy a Spider-Man costume and questions the clerk if it’ll fit. Stan Lee plays the clerk and responds with “it always fits, eventually.” and smiles. I find that important because there is not just “one” true Spider-Man, all of the characters in this movie were Spider-Man in their own timelines.

Overall, I would give the film a 9/10, everything was great about it and it’s probably one of the best-animated films I’ve ever seen. It really shows that Sony can make a good animated film, as long as fans understand the premise. You can either have a film that’s so bad like The Emoji Movie or you can have an amazing animated film like this one. So with the success of this movie and the after-credit scenes, there’s definitely going to be a sequel. It’ll be interesting to see what they are going to do.