The first thing that is immediately apparent about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is how absolutely terrific and groundbreaking the animation is — the film establishes the tone straightaway with the opening credits, which are full of vibrant style and epileptic twitch (a la Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void), setting the stage the delightful, family-friendly insanity that’s about to unfold. The stunning thing about the animation, once the film starts proper, is just how accurate directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman (and team) have filmically captured the feel of a comic book, complete with panel-by-panel moves, thought bubbles and description boxes, and all.

Lord and Miller wanted the film to feel like "you walked inside a comic book", and they were able to achieve this with masterful effect by combining computer animation with traditional hand-drawn comic book techniques, which were inspired by the work of Miles Morales's co-creator Sara Pichelli, including “line work and painting and dots and all sorts of comic book techniques” to make it look like it was created by hand. To make it feel more like a comic book, it was animated without motion blur, and came up with substitute versions of the traditional squash and stretch animation principles, “so that in texture and feel it felt different, but it still achieved the same goal.” This revolutionary achievement took a team of 142 animators, which is the largest animation crew that Sony Pictures Imageworks has ever employed, and each iteration of Spider-Man is given their own unique look and feel.