I’ve never read comics and I’m not a fan of race or gender swapped heroes so I was put off watching Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. I’ve seen how well it reviewed, so when I found it on a streaming platform I decided to give it a chance.

The animated movie has a nice art style, it doesn’t look too blobby or computerised and clearly has some level of hand drawn charm behind the base design. For me an art style like this makes a movie easy to sit through. So graphically it won me over, what next?

Appealing to my knowledge of the superhero. I’ve watched live action movies and the animated series from the nineties. The movie came in with a Peter Parker introduction that used moments from the Tobey Maguire movies which got me hooked straight away. Kingpin was the main villain of the movie which pleased me as he’s so under-utilised in mainstream Spider-Man content so far. They also kept Peter Parker in the movie without needing his character to dominate or even compete for the viewers attention.

Our main hero is Miles Morales, a kid from Brooklyn that’s just moved schools and is going through the sort of problems you’d expect before being bitten by a radioactive spider, gaining powers and getting involved in something that he handles badly. Over the course of the movie we see Miles develop as a character through a combination of his own mistakes, family tragedy and his confidence increases as he learns how to be a hero with some guidance from other Spider-People. All the characters are quite good, although I wasn’t sure who some of the villains were but that’s down to my knowledge.

The plot is fairly basic with Kingpin using magic level science to open a portal to another dimension to gain a replacement family for himself. The Spider-Man heroes must stop him. There’re other things going on too but the main plot is basically just villain must be stopped. The movie is very character driven.

We got action scenes covered in bits of colour with over the top attacks involving some silly ideas. There was enough going on to keep me engaged and I got a few laughs out of it.

After watching this movie I think the MCU should have had Miles Morales rather than Holland’s young Spider-Man as the character was fresh for me so fits the school environment a bit better. Even with the race swap Miles was done well, he didn’t diminish Peter Parker at all and had his own set of powers with a personality that made him unique. I do now like Miles as a character which means this movie did it right.

Into The Spider-Verse has a lot of charm with writing that shows care for the characters involved. There’s a message about how we’re not alone in our struggles and the tone it sets is just right. Given the timing of the movie I think this also helped the live movies onto the course of a multiverse as it shows how it could work (I know DC animation have done it before but this was more mainstream). I would recommend sitting through this one to any Spider Fan or just fans of superheroes or even story lovers, it’s great.