‘Spider  Man: a new universe’ and the good use of technology to “worse” the visual aesthetic

Tonight, Spider man flies over New York and lands at Movistar Premieres with a face – well, with more than one – to trap you in his multiverses. *Spider Man: a new universe*, winner of the Oscar for best animated film in 2019, excellently combines a good narrative proposal with a sensational technique.

in this installment the protagonist is not only the handsome Peter Parker, as the young Miles Morales takes over the helm: «He is half Puerto Rican, half African American, he is a product of a happy and alive family, he is 13 years old. All that says a lot about the kind of hero he is », commented the producer of him. And indeed, he is.

The writers also showed their enthusiasm for bringing the teenager’s story to the big screen. “His story of him makes a splash in the comics, we loved it, and we were so inspired that we tried to find a way to tell his story visually that was consistent with that.” The work is extremely visual and composes the story faithful to the comics from different perspectives.

The film breaks with the canon of commercial animated films

One of the most valued points of the film has been its detailed animation technique and own style. Its directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman have crowned themselves knowing perfectly combine the idiosyncrasies of the character with a unique visual style. they were very brave mixing classic animation, 3D, comic aesthetics including vignettes and onomatopoeia , psychedelia and a brilliant cartoonish touch. But the film goes even further, and as special effects supervisor Danny Dimian says: “We tried to do something differently, even if there was no real reason for it.

We wanted to change the term “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” to “If it ain’t broke, break it”. The goal was to encourage people to experiment and play in the hope of finding new ideas.”

To launch the initiative, they launched different tests, so they could check how the non photorealistic representation approach would work. These tests they revealed that traditional animation would not be enough to achieve what they wanted. They realized that the faces of the characters were not expressive enough. “When we looked at the comics, we noticed that they took the emotion out of the lines drawn on the faces of the characters. (…) That led us to the idea of ​​drawing lines on the face, as part of the animation, instead of them being part of the texture.”

This is how they were aware that by exploiting this to the fullest they would achieve their real objective: give the feeling that the film had been drawn in 2D and by hand, which leaves all those perfect “imperfections” in view that awaken the visual beauty.

Source images: Movistar Plus