Ani-May-Tion: Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse (Dir Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson, 2h20m, 2023)
How does one follow up a film that changed its medium? It's a question that's been posed to directors over the history of cinema, and films like The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens and The Godfather Part II have answered it. Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (2018) is one of those films; I've already written, at some length(!) about my love for the first Spiderverse film , it being one of the few films I've ever revisited in a second review, and I've charted its impact on animation since. Coming five years later, its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse , expands its world into multi-verse hopping, and from six Spider-Men (Spider-Folks?) a web of multitudes emerge as both allies and adversaries to Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) as he battles the dimension-hopping The Spot (Jason Schwartzman). It's thus bold that Spider-Verse spends nearly all of its opening twenty minutes with Gwen Stacey/Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld)...
