Miles Morales is back – or rather, never left. He has been doing the usual things a teenage superhero would do for a year, that is going to school, arguing with his parents and saving the world from more or less (im) probable threats. Whoever is gone, however, is the only circle of friends he had, namely Gwen, Peter, Peni, Spider-Ham and Spider-Man Noir, the Spider-Man of other dimensions who supported him in his first adventure and who have returned to their respective universes. One day, however, Gwen reappears in Miles’ bedroom, explaining to him that she has joined the Spider-Society, an interdimensional group of Spider-Man, led by Miguel O’Hara, whose intent is to prevent the collapse of the Multiverse. And one of the anomalies that can cause it is The Stain, a scientist who acquired the power to open portals between dimensions during the accident in the first film, and now Miles’ new enemy…
Miles grows, and the saga grows too: everything is bigger and more colorful, but everything is held up by the great writing and attention to the characters.
How many multiverses have we traversed with the eyes of perception in recent years? Randomly, there’s Russian Doll TV, Devs, and – coincidentally – Rick and Morty/Adventure Time/The Midnight Gospel triarchy animation. Marvel has pivoted the concept as its new narrative engine with the other triad Loki / Spider-Man: No Way Home / Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, while The Daniels have made it profitable on an authorial level with Everything Everywhere All at Ounces. Many shapes all together to peek, explore and maybe bring back. Yet it is not a question of forms, no, but of form.
This is what moved Phil Lord and Christopher Miller from the beginning when in 2018, with their backs well covered by Sony Pictures Animation, they slammed Spider-Man: A New Universe in the face of the cinemas, an unbridled public and critical success that has, and not in a figurative way, moved forward the boundaries of Western mainstream animation perhaps too anchored to the Pixar model-world. And this is what they have tried to do again with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the middle chapter of the spider trilogy dedicated to Miles Morales, which will be followed by Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse in March 2024.
Succeeding fully and continuing to literally give a show, working again and again not on forms but on form. Yes, because the sense of the operation of the writers/producers Lord and Miller (writing with David Callaham), the directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson and the animators all of Sony Pictures Imageworks, has always been that of make the most of the topos of the Multiverse not through an exponential proliferation of the same signs (once we are in a western and the next time in a horror) or stories (the different versions of a character), but rather the more radical one of having the whole ever-changing film-form.