1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
“I feel like there are colors in here that I’ve never seen before. That somehow, the filmmakers found a whole new spectrum to play with in order to fully do justice to their vision of this multiverse. Perhaps they, too, blew up a super collider to gain access to a whole new realm of color and movement, to give us a film that makes every single frame a unique visual treat.
Fundamentally, we are still telling a story about what it means to be Spider-Man. The film posits that across multiple universes, there are a few things that unite all of these arachnid-themed superheroes. And it also posits that Miles Morales might be an anomaly among them. This is very strange and intriguing, and it pains me to say that we will have to wait to see where they take those ideas.
In its place, we get Gwen and her watercolor universe; her specific shades of tragedy. We just live a little while with her, lingering on her rebellion, on her sense of abandonment, and her struggle to do the right thing. She is Spider-Man, too, of course; a little further along the story than Miles is, and a lot more jaded. There is so much conflict inside of her, and we are reminded that she is still just a kid, too, struggling with all the power and the responsibility that the role entails.
It’s beautiful, inside and out. At the risk of overselling it, I think the movie has fundamentally changed the way I think about animated films. It suddenly feels like everyone else isn’t trying hard enough. This is a goddamned film about a teenage superhero, and I felt just many things in its first ten minutes, just watching the way the backgrounds change, the way these characters move. And it just keeps hitting, over and over again. In exciting moments. In tender moments. In moments that don’t even seem to matter. They paint with new colors, and it feels like the world is a little different.” —Philbert Dy