“Anyone can wear the mask. You could wear the mask.”
By embracing this simple but powerful message, and with unparalleled craft, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse rocketed to the top of my Marvel list to become my instant favorite. And, in so many important ways, Spider-Verse is my top pick because of what it does differently. What it flips on its head.
Miles Morales’ final plunge into destiny – the moment the “What Up Danger” beat drops and so does our boy – may be the most layered example of those decisions coming to a head in beautiful concert. In short, it’s a stand-up-and-cheer moment. But what exactly makes the moment so powerful? How’d they do it? I’d say by truly understanding what a mask represents, honoring Spider-Man’s comic-book roots, and doing the exact opposite of what ninety-nine percent of superhero films would with their last big, climactic, “our hero comes into their own” scene. It’s subtly genius, it’s got a lot to do with masking and Cubism, and it’s the heart of what I want to talk about in this piece.
One Question, Many Angles
The Leap of Faith scene tackles the question of who Miles is from every angle visual storytelling allows. You’ve got basic shot-work supporting his growth, like the one of his reflection finally filling the Spider-Man costume. You’ve got pull-quotes, meaning resonant lines of dialog, peppered in throughout to remind us of what’s led up to this moment. And it’s all intercut with gorgeous, stylized animation. There are whole videos dedicated to the stellar VFX work on display here, including the development of entirely new graphics engines and specialized programs to allow animators to give each frame a fully hand-curated look.
It’s also the cathartic payoff of a series of standout moments we’ve already been fed. For example, we know Miles gets sticky hands when he’s afraid, so the shattering of the glass in this sequence tells us he’s leaping in spite of his fear, literally pushing off so hard that he’s pulling the window along with him. But this is fairly obvious, climax-type stuff. Spider-Verse never misses a beat, yet these elements aren’t what make this sequence one of my all-time favorites.
To get at that, we have to look at the ways in which the Spider-Verse team did honor to Spider-Man’s original medium, the comic book. Taking full advantage of the minute level of control animation provides, Spider-Verse constantly bombards us with panel-work, visual onomatopoeias, unusual compositions you’d almost never see in a live-action analog, and plenty of frames where Miles appears multiple times, not to mention flashy tricks like CMYK color offsets and variable frame rates.
Spider-Verse treats the screen as a full-on comic-book page, a la Ang Lee’s Hulk. Techniques that were originally used across multiple still panels to give the illusion of motion are now put into motion on film, as if the medium of comic books itself was achieving its true potential at the same time as our hero. It invites us not only to remember Spider-Man’s legendary history, a history Miles is about to become a part of, but also puts full focus on the idea of Spider-Man as a character and icon.
As much as this is Miles’ personal story, it’s also the story of Spider-Man the mythic figure, as that figure is manifested across infinite multiple dimensions. So it’s fitting that in this climactic moment, we get an accelerating number of visual references to Spider-Man as comic hero, as legend. This appeal to the character’s storied history is doubly appropriate, considering that in that moment you’re watching a movie that involved the collective efforts and teamwork of the largest team ever assembled by Sony Pictures Animation – a whopping 180 animators. We’re talking about a film that required a special camera array capable of projecting seven angles at once, and an animation process that sometimes took a month to produce four seconds of footage.
It all deepens the feeling of legacy the film’s about to bestow on our lead…and not just on our lead, but on us too. And that’s what makes Spider-Verse unique. Because after all, what ties all these Spider-people together? What’s the icon that stands in for the concept of Spider-Man? It’s right there in the movie’s most resonant line, and it’s an idea deeply entrenched not just in superhero culture generally, but in comic books as a medium. It’s all about the mask.
The Masked Slinger
There’s a great book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud that explains this better than I ever will, but the gist is this: A mask, by not featuring any facial details we recognize as specific to one person, allows us to project ourselves – our own feelings, reactions, and vicarious identity – onto a character more easily. This can be easy to forget in a world with a thousand superheroes running around, all with very specific backstories and agendas, but the idea of a mask goes hand-in-hand with the power of anonymity and collective identity. Unlike most superhero films, where the mask is often removed when it’s time for our hero to “get real” or “really be themselves,” Spider-Verse shows Miles rising to his full potential by donning the mask, embracing his status as an icon. Miles Morales is no longer only Miles Morales, but part of a legendary legacy that unites many Spider-people in a web of awesomeness. He’s not being elevated above a community, he’s joining one.
Nearly every other superhero movie treats its hero as a “Chosen One.” We watch as they find themselves, get discouraged, find themselves again, and finally reach their full potential as a badass space-wizard or thunder god. They get built up and built up, with us on the sidelines cheering them on. By contrast, in Spider-Verse the very instant our Chosen One reaches Special Boy status, the film turns around and gives that status away, sharing it with the audience in an act of triumphant generosity.
The sheer thrill you feel watching Miles take his Leap of Faith comes, in part, from that generosity. You’re not just watching Miles achieve his destiny, you’re invited in to be a part of it. The hope the scene expresses isn’t solely for Miles to achieve his goals…it’s for an entire community to come together and overcome. Spider-Verse inverts the Chosen One trope just like the camera inverts Miles’ fall and turns it into a skyrocketing rise.
Art Directors Dean Gordon and Patrick O’Keefe cited Cubist art as their inspiration for representing the dimensional quakes that are the primary threat in Spider-Verse. It’s a perfect choice, since Cubism often strived to represent a collection of multiple viewpoints on a subject all occurring simultaneously. Cubism was a fine artist’s way of trying to depict multiple points of view at once, just like Spider-Verse is a movie-maker’s way of revealing the same truth. Every sincerely-held viewpoint is valid. Cubism itself was one of art’s responses to the rise of photography…it was a way of proving that art could encompass more than just renderings of people and objects, that it could speak to emotion and point of view. Art could imbue subjects with a sense of dimension that photography lacks…or six dimensions, as in the case of Spider-Verse. Animation exists in a similar relationship with live-action film, so it’s especially satisfying to see a cartoon Spider-Man pulling off things that feel unfilmable in the traditional sense.
Origin Issues
If you don’t believe this is intentional, look no further than the final shot of the sequence, an emotional payoff that always brings tears to my eyes. Miles gets a comic. Just after a sequence doing visual honor to the medium of comics, Miles gets his own. But more importantly than that, his comic lands on a pile of other comics, comics we’ve seen throughout the film as we’ve gotten to know the various backstories of the other Spider-people. In each case, their whole life has been reduced to an origin issue, and in giving Miles the exact same treatment, it puts his story into scope.
Yes, this entire movie you just watched could be condensed into that comic book on-screen, but that also implies that each of the Spider-team’s life stories could have been expanded into a whole movie of its own…a whole life. Miles’ story is no more or less important or full than the stories of anyone else we’ve met on our journey, and to remind us of that fact in his moment of emergence is truly a gift to the audience.
It makes me think of a word – Sonder – it means “the realization that each passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” It’s a moving truism, but kind of the antithesis of superhero stories, which are traditionally the story of a mortal rising to divinity…you aren’t Superman. You just root for him and look up at him as he flies by, thinking, “Wow, that dude’s cool.” But Spider-Man is different. Spider-Man is from here. He’s one of us. And by acknowledging and enshrining that idea with a stunning work of art that understands comics on an atomic level, the team behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse earned the top spot in my heart. So shout it one more time for the folks at the back.
“Anyone can wear the mask. You could wear the mask.”
Chills.