Charles Solomon

One reason is the fresh animation style that sets it apart from the year’s other releases. “Spider-Verse” celebrates its print origins with bold graphics and mainstays of comic-book style, including thought balloons, printed words and wavy lines to indicate a tingling Spidey Sense. A.O. Scott, in his review for The Times, wrote that “the characters feel liberated by animation, and the audience will, too.”

Many recent American animated features look homogenized. More powerful computers and sophisticated software have made it possible to produce intricately detailed backgrounds and characters: You can see every leaf on every tree and every stitch in a sweater. But characters of all shapes and sizes seem to have very similar walks and runs and expressions.

“Spider-Verse’s” three directors — Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman — wanted to move away from that sameness, in part because Miles is so unlike the Spider-Man fans know from the live-action movies. “That made it doubly important for the film to look new, so viewers would feel like they’re seeing Spider-Man for the first time,” Ramsey said. “We couldn’t rest on the conventions of animated films as we’ve known them.”

Many of those conventions are built into the systems that produce computer-generated imagery.“In CGI films, many things you see on-screen are the result of the desire to automate the process: simulations for hair, cloth, wind, rain, etc.,” Persichetti explained. The decision to forgo tradition “was incredibly daunting — but also incredibly freeing.”

Initially, there was skepticism from the crew at Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio’s visual effects and animation unit, Rothman said. “We were asking people to break the production pipeline they’d spent decades building,” he added. But Imageworks ultimately “embraced what Bob proposed and came up with crazy solutions for how to do things.”

One of the first decisions they made was to eliminate motion blur. In live action, some movements are so fast the images appear smeared in individual frames of film. Computer animation can simulate the effect, giving the imagery a smoother feel; eliminating the blur produced more staccato accents.

“When we decided to strip out motion blur, the people at Imageworks said, ‘That’s not going to work, you won’t be happy,'” Persichetti recalled. “We said, ‘No, that’s the goal: Make us unhappy. Then figure out a new way to make us happy.’ We’re creating incredible images in this movie and we want to see them as clearly as possible, so let’s not soften them.”

The artists made a bigger decision to break with the way most computer-animated motion is achieved. Usually movements are created by advancing the image — say, a character raising his arm — in each frame, 24 times per second. It’s called “animating on one’s.” The resulting motion is fluid and smooth, but it can look too regular, even stolid.

Having worked at Disney with the Oscar-winning animator Glen Keane (whose characters include Aladdin, Beast and Tarzan), Persichetti wanted to borrow ideas from hand-drawn techniques. In traditional animation, much of the movement is done “on two’s”: A new drawing is made or the image shifted every second frame. Using animation on two’s gave the artists more control over the speed and power of the movements. Much of the animation in classic Disney features and Warner Bros. cartoons was done on two’s.

Working on one’s and two’s let the artists vary the rhythms of movements. When a scared Miles dashes through a snowy forest, his run is animated on one’s to emphasize his speed. When he stumbles and falls, he rises on two’s as he slowly pushes against gravity to get back on his feet.And when he leaps from skyscraper to skyscraper, the animation crackles with an energy it might otherwise lack. The motions themselves become exciting to watch.

The animation also allows the filmmakers to stress dynamic poses that telegraph how Miles is leaping and spinning through Manhattan. The screenwriter-producer Phil Lord explained: “Telling stories in sequential art is all about the key pose and going from pose to pose and frame to frame. Stan Lee laid it out in ‘How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.'”

But even the most exciting movements become empty exercises if they don’t contribute to our understanding of the characters. As he learns to control his newly acquired powers, Miles moves with more skill and confidence. He’s growing into the role of Spider-Man, but he’s also growing as an individual. The joy of his increasing strength and new friendships are balanced against the sorrow he experiences in his adventures. His movements and expressions reflect a new maturity.

During production, one of their directives was that “if it looks and feels like something from an animated film, it’s not our movie,” Persichetti said. “I think audiences are responding to that because it’s something they haven’t seen.”

One of the producers, Chris Miller (who directed “The Lego Movie” with Lord), explained that “we tried to avoid anything that felt like stock animation.”

“We looked at a lot of reference material and a lot of animators studied themselves in mirrors to figure how a kid like Miles would behave in that moment,” Miller said. “How can we make his movements specific to him instead of doing a standard take?”

If following Miles’ emotional journey wasn’t challenging enough, the animators also had to deal with a supporting cast of Spider-Men and Women from parallel dimensions. “Not only are they going to look different, their style of animation has to be different,” Ramsey said.

Looking back over the production, Miller concluded: “The technical challenges ended up being much more complicated than just doing the animation on two’s. But the techniques gave the film a signature look that emphasized the individual images.”

“From the beginning,” Miller said, “we wanted someone to be able to freeze any frame of the movie and have it look so good, they’d want to frame it and hang it on the wall.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/movies/spider-man-into-the-spider-verse-animation.html" id="806bf7a3-b6ea-32af-a768-d3f3c54b9919">The New York Times</a>.

“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” follows the adventures of an Afro-Latino teenager, Miles Morales, who has been bitten by a radioactive spider in New York City and joins forces with other Spideys from alternate dimensions. It’s one of the animation surprises of the season: both a box office hit and a critical favorite (certified 97 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) that has been collecting awards, even winning best picture from the Utah Film Critics Association.

How the 'Spider-Verse' Animators Created That Trippy Look

“It was daunting because the film means so much to me,” Marshall said in a recent interview. “But I felt, if anyone’s going to do a sequel, I would like it to be me, so I could protect the spirit of the first film. I asked myself what would I want to see in a sequel. I knew I’d want an animation/live-action sequence: It’s in the DNA of ‘Mary Poppins.’ And I felt it was vital to hold on to the classic hand-drawn animation from the first film.”

Although Marshall has won many awards for direction and choreography for feature films and television specials, he had never worked in animation. He built a team under the leadership of veteran Disney/Pixar writer Jim Capobianco. Working with a small group of artists in the Bay Area, Capobianco prepared preliminary storyboards for the sequence.

He presented them to Marshall, writers David Magee and John DeLuca, composer Marc Shaiman and others in the Hyperion Bungalow, a relic of the 1930s Disney studio that had been moved to company’s Burbank headquarters. As everyone wanted to recapture the feeling of the original film, it felt right to begin planning the sequence using actual drawings rather than computer images.

“We pulled together a storyboard — pinning sheets of paper onto corkboards, the old Disney way,” Capobianco said. “We met in the bungalow and pitched the boards using an umbrella as a pointer. Rob would say, ‘I love that idea, but we need a little more time.’ Marc would get on the piano and rewrite the music; we’d redraw stuff and re-pin it. I felt as close as I could get to being with Walt and the Sherman Brothers making the original ‘Mary Poppins.'”

Combining the media was a technique Walt Disney used when he first came to national prominence in the mid-1920s with his short “Alice” comedies, which placed a live-action little girl within an animated setting. Although film technology has advanced enormously since then, the crew of the new film, “Mary Poppins Returns,” still faced problems integrating the media seamlessly.

The animators strive to create convincing performances for their characters — who have to react to the live actors’ actions. For example, engineering a scene so an actor and an animated character touch requires almost microscopic precision: If anything is out of place, the drawn and live elements will seem to slide over each other, spoiling the illusion that they’re sharing a space.

“For an early test, we filmed a boy dressed like a ‘30s newsboy and put him in a scene with the animated bear,” Capobianco recalled. “When we looked at it, he stuck out like a sore thumb because of that costume. I realized that’s why Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews wear garish clothing in the ‘Jolly Holiday’ sequence: It integrates them into the cartoon world.”

Making the live actors look at home in the cartoon world was essential to the sequence, and artists from all the departments worked synergistically.

“Sandy Powell came up with the idea of painting the actors’ costumes to match the look of the animated characters,” Capobianco said, referring to the costume designer. “Mary Poppins wears a long pink and white gown that looks like it’s made of many layers of fabric. It’s actually just one piece of material that’s painted to look tiered; all the buttons and ties are painted, too.”

The key to the look of the sequence was the Royal Doulton bowl in the Bankses’ nursery, which takes the place of the chalk drawings in the first film as an entry to the animated world. Jeff Turley, the animation production designer, explained: “We looked at a lot of Royal Doulton bowls, and what caught my eye were the hand-painted ink decorations with sort of watercolor washes. That look is reminiscent of the work of Ronald Searle” — a British cartoonist — “and some of the Disney films, like ‘101 Dalmatians’ and ‘Mary Poppins.’ It felt like a good fit, at least as a starting point.”

Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) and the three Banks children, accompanied by Jack the Lamplighter (Lin-Manuel Miranda), ride a carriage driven by Shamus, a jaunty Irish setter (voiced by Chris O’Dowd) through the bowl’s landscapes and visit the Royal Doulton music hall — a sequence reminiscent of the “Jolly Holiday” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” numbers in the original movie. Blunt and Miranda interact with an assortment of animated animals, including penguins — a homage to the cartoon waiters in the previous film.

Filming the live performances so they could be combined with the animated elements proved challenging. “For the big music hall number, we were basically shooting the scenes three times,” Marshall said. “Once with Emily and Lin-Manuel and reference dancers representing the animated characters, so I could frame the shot and know how many people would be in it. Next, I’d take Emily and Lin out, and just shoot the reference dancers so the animators would know what they’d be doing. Then I’d take the reference dancers out and just have Emily and Lin-Manuel dancing, imagining everything around them.”

Capobianco added, “When we were on the set, we’d tell Lin and the other actors, ‘Remember, you’re carrying a penguin and it’s going to have a certain weight.’ As actors, they would have a zillion other things to think about, and the take wouldn’t quite be there. I’d ask Rob, ‘Can we get another take?’ He’d do it, and I’d say, ‘We still didn’t get it,’ and he’d say, ‘No, you got it.'”

The music hall scene was the first sequence the filmmakers shot. Marshall edited it while the rest of the filming was going on, to give the animators time to draw the other characters.

James Baxter, an animator whose first job at Disney was on the live action/animation combination film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” said the footage of the reference dancers was helpful.

“Obviously, we’re not doing the same movements — they’re real people with their own way of moving, which is completely different from the way a two-foot penguin moves,” he explained. “But to see how the choreography is working with all the other characters in the shot is really helpful. They were really good about not having the animation do just what the people did: You want to make the actions faster and cartoonier and snappier than a real person can move.”

If Marshall worried about matching the standard Walt Disney had set in the original “Mary Poppins,” the animators knew that the cartoon sequences had largely been drawn by Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, three of Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” whose work remains the gold standard of animation, even in the age of CGI.

“I’ve spent my entire career being intimidated by their work, so that’s nothing new,” Baxter said with a laugh. “It was great to have that high bar: It’s the motivator to do the best you possibly can, even though you know you’ll never get over that bar. If it’s not there, there’s not as much motivation to reach for the stars.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/movies/mary-poppins-returns-animation.html" id="c58ae1e7-0a22-3252-a945-76e28ac6bbd2">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — “Mary Poppins” was the first film director Rob Marshall saw as a boy, so when Disney approached him about directing a sequel, the prospect was exciting — and intimidating.

Mary Poppins: The Peculiar Challenge of Animating Her World

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Charles Solomon

Articles written by the author

How the 'Spider-Verse' Animators Created That Trippy Look

Mary Poppins: The Peculiar Challenge of Animating Her World