Into the Spider-Verse’s greatest legacy is giving American animators freedom to play

polygon.com:

When Polygon asked Januel Mercado, co-director of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, about animation that inspired the visual look of his DreamWorks movie, he had an easy answer: “Obviously Spider-Verse.” The movie’s evocative oil-painted style doesn’t look like the Shrek franchise that spawned it. But it doesn’t just give an existing series a makeover. Like so many American animated movies released in the last few years, The Last Wish veers away from the aesthetic that defined American animation for decades, working toward a more impressionistic and dynamic design.

And for that, we have Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to thank.

In 2018, the first Spider-Verse movie redefined not just superhero blockbuster movies (and if you want to get specific, Spider-Man movies), but also American animation as a whole. Its stylized approach celebrates animation as an anything-goes medium. Not only did it show audiences what animated movies could look like, it also emboldened directors and animators to push the boundaries of accepted aesthetics and take a chance on more stylized and personal art.

For most of the history of American animation, studios have been copying past successes. The Disney house style defined cartoons for decades, and when Pixar started releasing movies, it set a series of CG standards that everyone else reached for. After one last wave of traditional cel animation, CG became the norm stateside. And while technology has radically changed animation from the days of Toy Story to 2022’sLightyear, chasing realism became the stylistic norm. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but in the same way that it got tedious to see other studios copying Disney’s musical formula in the post-Renaissance era, it can be