Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.

A surprising delight that provides further evidence - along with the likes of The Incredibles - that animation is very possibly the best medium for many superheroes.

I've long been frustrated by the MCU's lack of style or identity - some of them push a bit harder than others, this is true, but there's a sort of series-wide blandness more often than not. Spider-Verse is the long-awaited counterpunch to that approach - a film overflowing with visual wit and identity. Whether it's through the bursts of comic book stylisation as punctuation mark, a dialogue scene with gravity defying camera and characters, or a finale which is a joyous explosion of outrageously vivid colour... Spider-Verse is always excited to push some new flourish to the surface, even if only for a split-second. Not only is this unusual for the super-hero genre, it's also extremely unusual for American mainstream animation. This is the closest anything from Hollywood in recent memory anything has gotten to the more stylised material you often find in Japanese animation. That there's a prominent anime-style character here is surely not coincidence. Indeed, it tries so many things that should conflict with each other - you have multiple different animation styles in the very same shot - that it's miraculous everything is so coherent. Even the background art - illustrated in a fetching soft focus that emulates the look of old-school 3D - is drawn with impressive confidence and purpose.

As a spectacle, it's second-to-none - the best big-screen effort in many years, maybe even ever, to boast the Marvel logo. It's not even close as far as I'm concerned. For the most part, the writing keeps it ticking along nicely - the Lord/Miller touch is obvious, but thankfully (especially given some of the early jokes explicitly nudging at the audience) it largely avoids dropping down the meta, wink-wink hole their work often does. Those jokes are there, but they don't get in the way - which is a relief when there's literally a bunch of fan callbacks casually conversing with each other on screen. Generally, though, it's all good, multi-dimensional fun with some of the best realisations of iconic characters (Aunt May in particular).

Now, it's worth bearing in mind this is still a film based on a Marvel comic - as is often the case with their work, there's no great insights to be found here beyond a relatively straightforward coming-of-age story. While few comic adaptations have so liberally dipped into the more obscure pages of series history, this isn't for example the sort of probing character or even genre study something like The Dark Knight films offered up. But taken on its own terms, Spider-Verse is the long-overdue antidote to superhero fatigue - truly a comic book come to life. Witty, entertaining and consistently inventive - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse may have been designed as a standalone spin-off, but it's easily the new king of the extended Marvel universe.

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