I do not have the habit of apologizing for my guilty pleasures, and I will not do it this time either. From time to time I love to watch animation movies. I do it not only for the nostalgia of Walt Disney’s masterpiece or to remember the pleasure of sharing the experience with my kids some time ago (it’s the turn of my grand-kids now), but also because I believe that the animation films, like any other genre, have their own successes as well as failures. When it succeeds, good animation is an aesthetic pleasure, a source of emotions and thrills, a joy that we remember in time as we remember any other good films. But this is not the case with ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ – the latest success from the House of Marvel. And I will not argue with the success either.
The more ambitious films of the comic-inspired genre are trying to bring new ideas to attract viewers, as even the most passionate fans of the genre need something new from time to time. In ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’, not even this new idea is exactly original – I’ve already seen in quite a few other movies the heroes of different comic series as they were brought to the screen and combined as heroes into the same story. In this case, the heroes of the various variants drawn or derived from Spider-Man, including Spider-Man Noir and Spider Girl, are gathered in one place (Manhattan, where else). Parallel universes of different stories with spider-men meet for the pleasure of the connoisseurs. Those less familiar with the sub-genre characters will not get that much from this reunion, and the resulting action did not seem terribly interesting to me either.
The result is, in my opinion, that we are dealing with yet another routine movie (animation movie this time), similar to just another magazine in a comics collection. For the enthusiasts it is important not to miss any issue. As an occasional spectator, nothing in the ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ seemed to me to be special, neither the animation nor the 3-D effects, neither the action nor the humor or the characters (the good or the bad). I’m sure this film will take its place in the collection and I am also sure that I’ll forget it quickly. Its makers have been able to create something sparkling but already dusty before time.