Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 stars

Bottom Line: More fun than I’ve had in a long time at the movies. Daring animation. Rich background. Wonderful character development. I will see this movie again and again.

Oh, delight of delights! What a wonderful movie “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” is! I will start by saying that this isn’t a perfect movie. There are small things here and there that don’t quite make sense if you think about it and I also really wish that the movie delved more into Uncle Aaron’s (Mahershala Ali) and Jefferson Davis’ (Brian Tyree Henry) relationship, but these complaints are nothing compared to the sheer joy of watching this film. Let’s sling some praise, shall we?

First off, the animation is both ground-breaking and familiar. Comic book fans will recognize it immediately for the style borrows heavily from the original source material. The style is a little hard on the eyes at first because of its unusual nature, but the brain quickly takes over and everything starts to blend seamlessly into a comic book come to life. This allows the animators to play with all sorts of comic book tropes like thought-bubbles and onomonapoedic special effects worded on the screen. I don’t want to make it sound like this is a cartoon version of a comic book, though, because the animation is so much more than that. It’s kind of like those flip book animations you created as a kid if instead of a flip book you had ninety million dollars.

It is also amazing how rich and complete the backgrounds of all the characters are, given both how many characters there are and the two hour movie time limitation. All of them are complete human beings by the end of the movie. This is quite an accomplishment given that they are all cartoon characters. You know enough about them to feel for them, from Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) to Aunt May (Lily Tomlin) to Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) and the rest. This speaks volumes for the talent of the people behind the cameras, the writers and the director and the editors.

Do you want to go see “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” again? I want to see “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” again! It had a decent enough opening weekend, but give it some love so they make more movies like this! It is certainly better than most of the Superhero movies out there. If it doesn’t win every Best Animated Movie awards this year, I shall pout.