Cleo Brann and Sally-Ann Marshall celebrate recent developments in the world of animation
Image: Megan Crombie
It’s clear by now that the Spiderman franchise has been wildly successful across many forms of media: from the original comics to live action movies and especially the animation scene in the form of the Spiderverse Trilogy. Following the story of Miles Morales, it has inspired countless new projects from several animation studios. It’s a well-known fact that the Oscar winning movie ‘Spiderman: into the Spiderverse’ has had a profound impact on 3D animation, with studios leaning more into stylised animation over realism. The huge success of these movies demonstrates that when so much personality and care is put into animation, this makes the product resonate with people much more.
Sony Animation’s ‘Spiderman: into the Spiderverse’ takes its inspiration from the comic book style. To mimic this style several innovative techniques were used to animate it. This includes animating on ‘twos’ giving it a less fluid look, the use of smear frames, and other comic style details such as halftones and line work. This demonstrates the care put into the film because it applies the context of the subject matter into the film’s art style. This ‘contextual art style’ has since been applied to many other films.
One such example is ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ made by Dreamworks. ‘Into the Spiderverse’ had a significant impact on the style and animation of ‘Puss in Boots’ without overshadowing the film’s identity. Just like the ‘Spiderverse’, ‘Puss in Boots’ experiments with frame rates, particularly in the fight scenes, and combines 3D and 2D animation techniques, elevating the storytelling. But ‘Puss in Boots’ uses a more painterly and illustrative art style, reflecting the fairytale world it is set in. This is the film’s ‘contextual art style’ giving ‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ its own identity. Nevertheless, the massive success of the ‘Spiderverse’ films has clearly encouraged other studios to be more experimental in animation.
However, not all of the films taking inspiration from the ‘Spiderverse’ were successful. ‘Wish’ was a milestone movie celebrating Disney’s 100th anniversary but didn’t break even at the box office. It combined hand drawn 2D elements with 3D animation to create the charm of classic Disney films, just as ‘Puss in Boots’ and the ‘Spiderverse’ did. Despite clearly taking inspiration from these films, ‘Wish’ comes across as hollow and algorithmic. This can be traced back to both writing and artistic issues. The film-makers neglect to create clear tonal contrast and depth in each scene making the animation feel empty and flat.
Disney’s ongoing trend of dulling vibrant colours with grey tones further mutes the film’s emotional impact. In contrast, ‘Spiderverse’ and Disney’s own ‘Tangled’ use bold, expressive colours to enhance the characters’ emotion and give more narrative depth. ‘Tangled’, another milestone movie, uses warm dark tones to express the characters’ current thoughts and feelings. ‘Wish’ fails to use colour choices that support the narrative or highlight the protagonist’s feelings.
The Spiderverse triology has also influenced the most recent addition to Sony Animation studios with the Netflix original ‘K-pop Demon Hunters.’ This movie has been massively successful, and its original songs have topped the charts. It is set to be one of the most watched movies of this year. It has a unique animation style, largely inspired by eastern 2D animation, utilising smear frames and blending 2D and 3D designs. Though it has a similar animation style to the ‘Spiderverse’ trilogy, it still has a lot of different visual styling with the influence from eastern animation and Korean mythology giving it its own identity.
Of course, modern animation doesn’t take influence solely from the ‘Spiderverse’ movies. Animation has been improving and developing in other ways. This can be seen in the incredibly popular Netflix series ‘Arcane’ made by the relatively new French studio Fortiche. Although Arcane has similarities with the ‘Spiderverse’ movies, it adds its own original techniques to animation. Arcane has quite a painterly style because it also combines 2D and 3D animation. But 3D animation isn’t the only successful type of animation: eastern 2D animation has had a lot of development recently. For example, Studio Ghibli’s most recent movie ‘The Boy and the Heron’ won an Oscar for best animated feature in 2024 and Ufotable’s movie, ‘Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle’, has made history by making over $600 million worldwide (top 10 at the box office) since its release on the 12th of September, 2025.
The popularity and quality of animation has increased significantly over the past few years and seems only to be getting bigger and better. Coming up is ‘Goat’, a new movie by Sony, once again featuring a unique but similar animation style to ‘Spiderverse’. Fortiche also has their first feature in development, ‘Penelope of Sparta,’ inspired by Greek mythology and specifically the Odyssey. Animation is clearly evolving rapidly and we look forward to the long-awaited conclusion of the Spiderverse franchise in 2027 with ‘Spiderman: Beyond the Spiderverse’.
