Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse was released December 14th, and tells the story of Spider-Man, with a few twists. Instead of having the main focus on Peter Parker, the spotlight is on Miles Morales, an Afro-Hispanic teenager as he tries to become his dimension’s version of the web-slinger after the Peter Parker in his universe dies at the hands of Kingpin. But before he passed, during Kingpin’s attempts to try to bring his deceased wife and son from another dimension with a super-collider, Peter Parker accidentally finds himself in the middle of the machine, which summons other versions of the titular character into Miles’ universe. These other versions include Peni Parker, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Ham, Peter B. Parker, and Spider-Man Noir.

In short, everything about this movie is amazing, spectacular, and sensational. It’s hard to imagine that the studio that made this movie was the same one that made the “advertising abomination” known as the Emoji Movie. Every single part of this movie never failed to disappoint. To start, the animation was beautiful; and had a style that was so unique from any other movie ever made. Some might notice and comment on a few of the lines and coloring not being clean, but this was made intentional to reflect that vintage comic book style, where the printing would almost always make a mistake in one way or another. Other ways that the style was so unique was how there would be text boxes and speech bubbles to tell us what the characters were thinking, and the use of visual onomatopoeia during actions scenes were a very nice callback to the source material as well.

But to create this new look was no small feat. The production on the movie originally started in 2014, and every second of the movie took up to a week for one artist to render. When all was said and done, over 800 animators had worked on the film taking almost 4 years to complete.

Peter Ramsey, one of the three directors of the movie, had a few comments on why they went with the acute style they did.“We couldn’t rest on the conventions of animated films as we’ve known them,” Ramsey said. “This made it doubly important for the film to look new, so viewers would feel like they’re seeing Spider-Man for the first time.”

Each factor of the characters, from their backstories to their character design, seem to jump right off the page. It also helped that every character that came from a different universe had their own personal style to reflect what their dimension would be like. For example, Spider-Man Noir in always black and white, and Peni Parker and the SP//dr suit in a more Japanese anime style.

Overall, the movie has gained quite a following, ranging from critics to die-hard spidey fans to the ones diving into the “Spider-Verse” for the first time. So far, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse has won a Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film, Critics’ Choice Movie Award and New York Film Critic Circle Award for Best Animated Feature, as well as many other nominations from other various groups and organizations.

It has even done so well, that even before it’s initial United States release, Sony Pictures Animation already announced that a sequel and a spinoff show were both in the works.

But one thing that was not planned in the making of the flick was the sudden passing of Stan Lee, one of Spider-Man’s co-creators and creator of many other famous Marvel characters such as the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and most of the X-Men. But by far, his greatest creation was Spider-Man. As most fans know, Stan Lee usually makes a cameo appearance in most Marvel movies, due to him being such a big influencer in the comic book industry. But on November 12th, 2018, hearts were shattered across the country to hear that he had passed at the age of 95. Shortly after, Marvel reported that he had already shot his cameos for Captain Marvel, and Avengers: Endgame. But it was also mentioned that Lee would have a larger cameo than usual for a regular comic book movie in Sony’s new upcoming Spider-Man movie. And when it came time for the release of the film, Lee’s appearance served as the perfect, tear-jerking tribute to the man responsible for creating and becoming a hero.

Thank you, Stan, for all that you’ve done and for the amazing universe that you created.