Then there’s the icing on the cake, the ace up the sleeve of “Across the Spider-Verse” — it’s also a movie that mixes mediums and offers us the most effective animation/live-action hybrid since “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”
Granted, these are basically simply two, very quick scenes, however they’re so seamless, so highly effective and imaginative that it’s onerous to wrap your head round them. We first see this when The Spot unlocks his potential to journey the multiverse and goes to a universe that is actually a 2D comedian ebook, particularly one that appears like Amazing Fantasy comics the place Spider-Man first appeared. Then, he visits a world totally made from Lego, and extra importantly, he unintentionally opens a portal to the universe of the “Venom” films and comes head to head with Peggy Lu’s Mrs. Chen.
Throughout the film, we get a number of flashes to live-action “Spider-Man” films, illustrating what Miguel O’Hara calls “canon events” within the lifetime of Spider-Man, however these are largely scenes from earlier films performed on floating screens, not interacting with the characters. But when Spot sees Mrs. Chen, or in a while when Miles meets Donald Glover’s Prowler, they work together and discuss as organically part of the identical body as Bob Hoskins grabbing Roger Rabbit by the throat and kicking him out of his residence.
It is among the greatest surprises of the movie. To have animated characters work together with live-action ones, and for it to look this seamless is nothing wanting a brain-breaking miracle.