If you want to understand what I mean by that, we need a little history and context.
First, old guys like me still remember when comics were printed in colour with a four colour process that looked like this:
We've moved on to computer colouring these days, but that classic look still screams "comic book" to pretty much anyone older than their 30s or so.
Second, even before the current golden age of superhero cinema, a lot of attempts have been made to bring superheroes to the big screen. Interestingly though, the really obvious idea of making a movie about a comic book character that looks like a comic book has rarely been attempted and succeeded even less frequently. Movies that look like comics have been made on occasion but rarely about superheroes, which seems odd when you think about it.
Back in 1990 one of the few attempts was done with comic book (non-super) hero, Dick Tracy. Actor/Director/Producer Warren Beatty created a unique film experience by using a colour palette for the film that consisted of single shades of each of the colours in the film with almost no exception. One shade of yellow, one red, etc. So every yellow car, dress, door or prop was the same shade of yellow as Dick Tracy's coat and hat. Visually the film was amazing and in a stylish way it achieved a sort of comic book look successfully.
In 2003, Ang Lee (then about the hottest director on the planet) directed a version of Marvel's Incredible Hulk that while including numerous missteps like the gamma poodle and an unfortunately cartoonish cgi Hulk, also came pretty close to being a filmed comic book. Multi frames and overlapping shots framed with a white border to resemble comic panels, some of the earliest effective cgi humanoid effects and some beautiful comic book-ish scene transitions made for a pretty legitimate stab at a filmed comic book. With the dismal critical reception and so-so box office, the style Lee created didn't catch on with future filmmakers. Personally I love the look of the film but it's not great otherwise.
Tonight I saw the most comic book movie ever. Sure, it's not a stretch to make an animated film look comic book-ee in ways that wouldn't work in live action. That's a given. The funky interdimensional shorthand in the film would be jarring and weird in live action. The Salvador Dali background of the fifth act and the overlay of hand drawn animation, thought bubbles and the occasional "boing" or "slam" written out comic style in a cgi world just wouldn't work in live action. You can easily imagine them on the page and vice versa.
What really sold me though, beyond the ridiculous awesome of Nic Cage's Spider-Man Noir meeting Spider-Ham in Miles Morales's version of New York, was the four colour look of the thing. The entire film is overlayed (underlayed? interwoven?) with the instantly recognizable dot pattern of a traditional four colour comic book, just like the picture above. For the most part it's subtle enough that if you don't know what you're looking at you could be forgiven for not recognising the patina for what it is, but it's there in every frame. In a real sense, every frame of the film is actually an honest to Stan Lee comic book frame. For all its cgi driven madness, Spider-Man - Into the Spider-Verse is at its heart a love letter to the kinds of comics I read as a kid and that are responsible for my lifelong love of the form.
My only real beefs with it are the Peter Parker version voiced by Jake Johnson and a disturbingly weird version of Kingpin. Johnson's part is written fine but I kept thinking how much it came across as a PG Deadpool. Not a fan. Thankfully, Lily Tomlin's Aunt May, Hailee Seinfeld's Gwen Stacy and the freshest take on Doc Ock you've ever seen balance all that out.
Whatever else it is, it is the MOST comic book movie I've ever seen. It's also damned good and truly beautiful in its own way. You should go. I figure if it does really well, we might be one step closer to a Miles Morales live action Spider-Man. That would be something to see, even if it isn't overlayed with a patina of four colour printing.
No comments:
Post a Comment