December 14, 2018 · United States
Into the Spider-Verse rebuilds the look of computer animation
The blockbuster that made computer animation stop looking like computer animation
Released in December 2018, Into the Spider-Verse layers hand-drawn line work over computer-animated characters, prints halftone dots into the image, deliberately misregisters color channels, and animates its lead on twos while everything around him moves on ones. It looks like nothing else, and it earned the highest recognition available to an animated feature.
| Date | December 14, 2018 |
|---|---|
| Technique | 3D computer animation |
| Production type | Feature film |
| Artist, studio or institution | Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks |
| Country or region | United States |
| Period | The 2010s |
In summary
Hand-drawn line work over three-dimensional characters, printing artifacts such as halftone dots and misregistered color, deliberate chromatic aberration and characters animated on twos produced a feature that looked like a printed comic in motion.
For twenty years the industry converged on one smooth, well-lit look. This film walked away from it.
Non-photorealistic rendering, at scale
The production built tools that let artists draw marks in two dimensions which then adhere to three-dimensional surfaces and follow them through movement. Expression lines above a character's head, hatching along a jaw, a smear across a fast movement: all drawn by hand, all sticking to geometry.
On top of that sit printing artifacts borrowed from cheap color comics. Halftone dots scale with depth to suggest focus. Color channels separate slightly at the edges of fast motion. These are reproduced deliberately as design decisions, in a medium that had spent two decades eliminating exactly such imperfections.
Frame rate as characterization
The most quietly radical choice concerns timing. The inexperienced lead is animated on twos, at half the frame rate of the confident characters around him, so he appears fractionally less fluid without the audience consciously registering why. As he gains competence, his animation moves to ones.
This makes an abstract production parameter carry narrative information. It also reopened a question the industry had considered settled: whether smoothness is a goal, or simply one option among several.
What it reopened
The immediate consequence was permission. Studios that had assumed a mainstream animated feature required a particular polished look began producing painterly, graphic, textured and deliberately stylized films, and the range of acceptable house styles widened sharply within five years.
It also cost an enormous amount of skilled labour, since much of the effect depends on artists drawing frame by frame over rendered images. The film's influence and the industry's ongoing argument about working conditions in animation are, to some extent, the same story.
Historical context
The production developed custom tools so that drawn marks could be applied per shot and would follow animated surfaces, and it staffed a large team of artists specifically for that work.
Importance for the industry
It broke a two-decade convergence on a single smooth, photorealistic house style and proved that a blockbuster could be radically stylized without losing a mass audience.
Consequences for later productions
Non-photorealistic rendering became a mainstream ambition, variable frame rates entered general practice, and subsequent studio features across several companies adopted deliberately graphic visual identities.
Sources consulted
- Academy Awards database, 2019 ceremony Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
- Computer graphics history ACM SIGGRAPH
Links point to the collections, catalogs and reference works consulted. How sources are chosen and weighted is explained in sources and methodology.