Five years after “Spider-Man: New Generation”, the public can now discover this Wednesday at the cinema “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”. This sequel takes Miles Morales into the Multiverse.
What is it about ? After reuniting with Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man, the friendly hero from Brooklyn, is catapulted through the Multiverse, where he meets a team of Spider-Heroes charged with protecting its existence. But when the heroes clash over how to handle a new threat, Miles finds himself pitted against them and must redefine what it means to be a hero in order to save the people he loves most.
Next in ideas
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and grossed nearly $385 million worldwide. The bar was therefore high for this sequel.
“The first game was a huge challenge and the team worked on it until the very last minute. We started thinking about a second chapter as soon as we finished the first one in 2018. Of course, [les scénaristes et producteurs] Phil Lord and Chris Miller knew from the start what direction we were going with this story.”explains Kristine Belson, president of Sony Pictures Animation.
She points out that the artists at Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks have gone to great lengths to surpass the first film’s prowess: “What really challenged us was to try to go further visually than in the previous film and we have, for example, integrated 2D elements into the animation that pay homage to the graphic style of comics. In this new opus, we dive even deeper into the Spider-Verse, which allowed us to explore several styles of animation and to create even more significant settings than in the first chapter”.
In the end, the film takes place in 6 dimensions, has 240 characters and required the work of 1000 animators.
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Newcomers
Among the new characters audiences get to see in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse are:
- Jessica Drew, aka Spider-Woman from Earth-332. “All the young girls wanted to be Gwen after the first movie came out and now all the mothers are going to want to be Jessica Drew”, says producer Chris Miller. Director Kemp Powers adds: “She’s obviously very pregnant while fighting crime and she’s really tough. She’s the only Spider-hero who doesn’t lead a double life and she can come out as she is, and that means that she really has style.”
- Pavitr Prabhakar: This Indian version – and totally original – of Spider-Man made its first appearance in the album Spider-Man: India, by Sharad Devarajan, Suresh Seetharaman and Jeevan J. Kang, which dates from January 2005. Pavitr lives in Mumbai, a futuristic and sprawling crossroads between Manhattan and Mumbai, on Earth-50101. He was not bitten by a radioactive spider but got his powers from a mystical shaman.
- Hobie Brown, aka Spider-Punk, is a member of a rock band. He comes from a world that is a bizarre mix of the London rock scene of the 70s and 80s and contemporary New York. He uses his guitar as an instrument but also as a weapon.
- May “Mayday” Parker: First appeared on the album What If…? #107 in December 1997, May “Mayday” Parker is Peter and Mary Jane Parker’s first child in an alternate future universe.
- Dr. Jonathan Ohnn, aka the Stain, appeared in the album Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #98 in January 1985. Created by Al Milgrom and Herb Trimpe, Ohnn, in the Spider-Verse, is a scientist who, while working for the Kingpin, uses occult forces to create portals to other worlds.
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A new artistic team
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse continues the adventures of Miles Morales, hero of African-American and Puerto Rican descent, created by comic book writers Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli in 2011. The three directors this time are Joaquim Dos Santos (director and executive producer of The Legend of Korra, Avatar, The Last Airbender and Voltron, the Legendary Defender), Kemp Powers (writer and co-director of Soul) and Justin K. Thompson (production designer of Spider-Man : Next Generation and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Phil Lord and Chris Miller are returning to produce, and are also co-writers on the film.
Wink
Attentive viewers will be able to see Doctor Octopus and Green Goblin plushes in baby Mayday’s bassinet.