If you’re a Marvel fan, then you can probably agree that this movie truly was the best-animated film of the year!
In a major validation for Sony and Marvel, and just 614 days after they were fired as the co-directors of “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” Phil Lord and Chris Miller won the Academy Award for best animated feature for Sony’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”
While accepting the award, Lord celebrated the representation in the movie and what it meant for people.
“When we hear that somebody’s kid was watching the movie and turned to them and said, ‘He looks like me,’ or ‘They speak Spanish like us,’ we feel like we already won.”
Speaking about the film’s vast creative team and their four-year effort to deliver the animated epic, Miller said, “There’s 800 filmmakers who pushed boundaries and took risks to make people feel powerful and seen.”
With “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” Lord and Miller delivered a genre game-changer with a $90 million production budget that went on to make $360 million in global box office since its mid-December release.
Adding to the spirit of revolution, Spider-Verse is only the second theatrical animated film ever based on characters from Marvel Comics; the first was Big Hero 6 in 2014. And unlike previous big-screen Spider-Man adaptations, Spider-Verse featured a new version of the hero — a bilingual, mixed-race teen named Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore).
The movie also had a fire hip-hop soundtrack, sound effects written-out visually on the screen and a trippy plot about alternate universes and multiple versions of the wall-crawling superhero.
And for any sentimental superhero fan, the timing of Spider-Verse gave it an extra emotional resonance because the film arrived just weeks after the death of one Spider-Man co-creator, Stan Lee, and six months after the passing of legendary artist Steve Ditko.
“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” topped some big name Disney titles — “Incredibles 2” and “Ralph Breaks the Internet” — along with Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” and Japanese adventure “Mirai.”
By: Maytinee Kramer
