One of the most astonishing things about “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is that the filmmakers, through some sort of miraculous, creative happenstance, remembered that animation is an unlimited medium.
There is a tendency among certain well-regarded animation studios (cough Disney cough), to push its animation style and character designs over to a very specific place.
It’s rare in, say, “Frozen,” for scenes to dip into the abstract, or for characters to look genuinely striking and odd.
In Disney films, especially the CGI animated ones, the characters tend to be like puppets.
They can only squash and stretch so far, and they will never be off-model.The characters in “Across the Spider-Verse” meanwhile, all seem to have emerged from their own private universes — which, by the premise’s dictates, they did.
There is a character who looks like a drawing out of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
Another seems to be…
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