Phil Lord and Christopher Miller know a thing or two about delivering high-quality animated entertainment, having been involved as either producers, writers or directors on Clone High, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and its sequel, The LEGO Movie and The Second Part, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines.
The latter has to be considered one of the front-runners for this year’s Best Animated Feature Academy Award, having won rave reviews from critics and fans alike, while drawing massive viewership figures on Netflix. Next up for Lord and Miller is the two-part Across the Spider-Verse, which is shaping up to be another acclaimed web-slinging adventure.
In an interview with IndieWire, the filmmaking do explained how The Mitchells vs. the Machines, director Mike Rianda, production designer Lindsey Olivares, and the movie’s distinctive animation style encouraged them to keep pushing the medium forward when they dived back into the world of Marvel Comics adaptations.
“It doesn’t have to have realistic pupils, the homes don’t have to look like showrooms, but messy and lived in. They could feel homemade and like watercolor illustrations. Lindsey’s artwork emphasizes your imperfections, things about yourself you want to cover up, like bigger ears. She celebrated the individuality of the characters instead of trying to shave off those things. We have a movie where that choice has been made over and over again, taking the little things that make people wonderful. It’s been fun to have the confidence to go even harder and push the medium even further and take Miles [Morales] to places you couldn’t imagine.”
The first footage from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse went down a storm online, promising that the scale, spectacle, and stakes have all been raised significantly. In fact, the biggest challenge facing the return of Shameik Moore’s Miles Morales is whether or not it can live up to the ideas fans have in their heads already.
