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There’s a version of Spider-Man that owns a spaceship. The spaceship can turn into an enormous robot.

It’s debatable whether or not this is the strangest detail about Japanese Spider-Man, the result of a licensing deal between Marvel and a Japanese production company. There’s the magical alien blood. There’s the fact that this Spider-Man might be fueled by revenge. There’s his worrying efficiency with machine guns. There’s the prevalence of suicide and child abuse. There’s the fact that, as the Honest Trailer reveals, Spider-Man would want to vanish from the world with a young boy in hand. If only it was permitted. And then there’s just the expected deviations of hilariously bad special effects. It’s a trip. It was also, for the longest time, for decades, the only theatrical release of Spider-Man to not feature Peter Parker as the protagonist.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse is keenly aware of the relative uniformity, and complete ubiquity, of Peter Parker as opposed to Takuya Yamashiro. The computer-animated film swings into action with a snappy recap delivered by the red and blue wallcrawler himself. With snapshots of the most recognizable scenes from the most recent iterations of Spider-Man, and a friendly dig at the final installment in Sam Raimi’s trilogy, we get a rundown of what may very well be the most famous superhero origin story there is: bitten by a radioactive spider, saved New York a lot. The story is relayed quickly, perhaps with a bit of fatigue, though no less proudly. After all, there’s only one Spider-Man.

The next person we see in Into The Spider-Verse, however, is Miles Morales. Mumbling the words to a Post Malone song, sketching in his notepad when he’s already late for school. It’s a school Miles isn’t particularly excited to attend. He tells his father, a cop, that it’s elitist and his father responds with confusion and dismay at the possibility that his son would willingly throw away all of the opportunities that come with attending a private, high-end learning institution. Miles has a mind for science, though it seems that he’d be just as happy painting graffiti with his uncle Aaron. Spray-bottle portraits which burst with color and creativity. It’s one another thing Miles’ father doesn’t understand.

Into The Spider-Verse doesn’t spend too long on the specifics of Miles’ inner life; the necessities of world-saving taking precedence. But in the film’s first act, there is more than enough to indicate that this origin story is different. Uncle Aaron isn’t stressing Great Responsibility. He’s giving Miles advice about girls and teaching him about the importance of a good shoulder tap. By the time Miles Morales and Peter Parker come face to face, they’re not variations on the same type of person but two opposites working together for the greater good.

Or at least they’re trying to work together.

“I think you’re gonna be a bad teacher,” Miles tells Peter at one point. He’s right to be concerned. Faced with saving Brooklyn, and possibly beyond, from the complications of alternate universes collapsing onto each other, Miles gets a beaten down version of Peter Parker that had to bury Aunt May and eventually divorced Mary-Jane because he couldn’t handle the strain of being a superhero. This version of Peter, far from what his buoyant narration suggests, spends his days stuffing his mouth with pizza and sobbing in the hot tub over his many losses. But he agrees to help. Because he’s still Spider-Man. He’s still fundamentally good.

Perhaps more than any other big screen adaption of the comics so far, Into The Spider-Verse celebrates the source material. Miles first acknowledges the frightening possibility of having superpowers when he comes across an old comic book. At several points in the film, characters are scrolling through the contacts on their phone and names like Steve Ditko and Sara Pichelli (the artist behind Miles Morales) pop up. Here and there, the computer animation takes the form of a comic book as a whole; panels and speech bubbles and colorful asides filling the screen.

Unquestionably more than any other adaption so far, Into The Spider-Verse celebrates the ethos of Spider-Man. It jettisons the well-worn ‘great responsibility’ line, mocking it at turns, in favor of a more relatable truth about what it takes to be the web-slinging hero—when you fall, you get back up. This is a mantra which begins as the film does and recurs throughout. It could be anyone under the mask. It could be Peter Parker, sure, but it could also be Miles Morales; a character thought up in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory and influenced, at least partially, by Donald Glover.

For that matter, it could be a woman under the mask. Gwen Stacy, voiced by Hailee Steinfeld, and driven to fight injustice after the murder of her best friend. It could be Spider-Man Noir, in black and white, perplexed by the colors of a Rubik’s Cube, and voiced to perfection by Nic Cage. It could be Peni Parker, who looks like she was ripped right out of an anime. It could even be a pig, voiced by John Mulaney, with a bevy of cartoonish weapons ready to be used against any villain that insults the validity of cartoons. The animation shifts noticeably, seamlessly, to accommodate the differences between each character and to highlight all that unites them.

It comes at a small cost. While responsibilities behind the camera are deftly split between three directors, and while the duo behind The Lego Movie work in a similar brand of winning humor for the screenplay, there are a lot of plots to serve and not enough minutes to serve them. Morales and Parker, as voiced Shameik Moore and Jake Johnson, face off against a delightfully diabolic Doctor Octopus in a subplot that could have constituted its own movie. The easy amity between rookie and mentor is strong and relatively underutilized. Likewise, the rift between the cop father and the anti-authority uncle is merely hinted at with a few lines of dialogue. It’s weighty material for potential sequels in any case. Those will doubtlessly be in discussion after the success of Into The Spider-Verse.

The film’s got a Golden Globe, an Academy Award, universal acclaim by audiences and critics, and has helped even more so than Spider-Man: Homecoming to revitalize a struggling property. The film succeeds, it accomplishes all this, not by deviating from Spider-Man’s core message but taking it to its natural conclusion. In one of his last spoken cameos in a Marvel movie, Stan Lee tells Miles that ‘it always fits… eventually.’ He’s referring to the Spider-Man costume that an uncertain Miles is thinking of buying. In another way, it could be said, that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like. If you’re willing to do what’s right, if you’re willing to get back up after you fall, then you’re Spider-Man.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse hones in on the universality of its hero, making it one of the best superhero movies in of all time.