ANNECY, France — With more than 240 characters across six
dimensions, the makers of “
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” are pushing
animation and storytelling to their limits with the follow-up to their
Oscar-winning hit.
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Early,
unfinished images of the sequel — one of the most anticipated of releases 2023 —
received a standing ovation at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival
in France on Tuesday.
It once again
centers on New York teenager Miles Morales, who is just one of several
different forms of spider superhero spread across parallel dimensions.
Like the first
installment, 2019’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”, it is set to be a
demonstration of technical wizardry, with different visual styles used for each
of the universes the superhero visits.
Among the scenes
unveiled on Tuesday was a wildly impressive fight with a vulture in New York’s
Guggenheim Museum, with a heavily pregnant Spider-woman crashing into the scene
on a motorcycle.
Morales “has
always been the core of it. But we didn’t want to rest on our laurels and take
the easy path,” Kemp Powers, one of the film’s three directors, told AFP.
The team feels
the weight of expectation this time around.
The first film
was a sleeper hit, gradually building up steam thanks to strong reviews and
audience reactions — ultimately winning the best animation Oscar.
“It’s very ambitious — the idea was to push ourselves creatively and test
the limits of what technology can do,” said co-director Joachim dos Santos,
while promising that the plot would still be comprehensible to everyone from
“babies to grandparents”.
‘Wonderful medium’
The team is having particular fun creating a new villain The Spot, to
be voiced by
Jason Schwartzman, whose body is a series of holes that look like
a shape-shifting, unfinished drawing.
“Animation is a
wonderful medium because there’s things you can only do with animation,”
co-director Justin Thompson told AFP.
“You couldn’t
imagine any live-action medium being able to replicate what we’re doing right
now with The Spot in terms of his appearance, his movement, his interaction
with multiple people at the same time... it would look so cheesy in
live-action, but it actually looks fluid in animation.”
While the
directors enjoy escaping the limits of reality — “none of the film is bound by
physics or gravity,” said Powers — there are some unavoidable constraints.
“We take five or
six years per film. We have large crews but no one can imagine how much time it
takes to make only a few seconds,” he said.
“While our
imagination has no limits — time is a limit.”
The film is due
for worldwide release in June 2023 and a third installment is planned for the
following year.
The creators are
determined that both get a full theatrical release, especially after Powers had
to see his previous film,
Pixar’s “Soul”, go straight to streaming because of
the pandemic.
“We make these for the
big screen, and these will be on the big screen, barring an alien invasion or a
world war!” he said.
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