Context is Everything: Fort Wayne Animator Ron Lewis Reviews Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

University of Saint Francis’s animation and visual effects instructor Ron Lewis had some strong feelings after seeing new blockbuster starring Miles Morales, an African-American/Puerto Rican alternative-universe Spider-Man, that’s now winning all of the awards for groundbreaking animated techniques that…believe it, or not…have roots in the early beginnings of animation itself.  Basically, an animated film released in December 2018 was made with similar techniques used in 1928’s “Steamboat Willie,” Mickey Mouse’s first movie.

Without spoiling too much, here’s Ron Lewis, in his own words:

I think the usual front running suspects, like Disney, Pixar, Marvel Studios…did not make content that could stand up to Spider-Man.  We got two stories that were sequels and it felt as if they were resting on laurels. But with Spider-Man, there’s something special about it, something we’ve never seen before in animation.

“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was co-directed by African-American filmmaker Peter Ramsey who grew up reading Spider-Man comics, at the expense of reading other Marvel titles.  So, if nothing else, he was going to protect the character and story from a reliance on special effects.

Taken from a mid-December interview with BlackFilm.com, Ramsey said, “it all goes back to story. No matter what the film looks like, no matter how complex it is or how flashy it is, it all gets down to are you telling a story that communicates the experience of a character that people are going to engage with?”

As an animator and artist, I was drawn to the story, but, of course, what really hooked me was the need of the writers and directors to push the visual limits of this film. It could have been just another CG animated film and at first, I thought it was going to be and so I had low expectations.  I saw the hodge-podge of rendering effects. Sony and its directing team was clearly trying to make this a moving comic book.  And they succeeded.

“Spider-Man” used the technique of animating on the 1’s and 2’s.

The process of animating on 1’s and 2’s came about from a guy back in 1895 named Emile Cohl.  He knew that animation needed to be smoothed out. You can animate one single frame, with one frame after another, but what Emile Cohl did was to smooth out the process of animation when he doubled up on his frames. Which means he drew one frame and then copied that frame.

Remember flip-books?  Flip-books work best if you double each picture (or frame) in the book.  If you construct a flip-book with only one copy of each picture/frame, the flipping appears too fast that the human eye can’t see what’s happening.  If you make a book with three copies of each picture/frame, the flipping appears too slow.  Doubling the frames in a flip-book makes the flipping smooth to one’s eye.  What “Spider-Man” did that was remarkable was that it used a combination of animating on both the 1’s and the 2’s, creating this start/stop feel when the story demanded it.  

With “Spider-Man” doing that…speeding up action and slowing it down…the film gave us a sense of how 3-dimensional models moved like over-exaggerated animated characters, not like live action characters [like in most animated films].  And watching that was incredible.

The Golden Globe-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” is now in theaters.