Liev Schreiber – Memphis Flyer

All superhero movies should be animation.

It’s really not that far from where we are now. For large chunks of, say, Avengers: Infinity War, everything the viewer sees was rendered by a computer. It’s only the need to have Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson appear as Captain America and Black Widow that keeps them from going totally CGI. This grounding in the real world is necessary in order for us to take seriously these stories of men in tights saving the world by punching each other.

The problem with “grounding” comic book stories in the real world is that you lose an essential element. Read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, and you’ll never look at a Spider-Man comic book the same way again. Comics are not just a storytelling medium — they’re vastly inferior to the written word in that regard. There’s also visual and design elements that are unique to comics, the most obvious being combining words and design elements to evoke sound. Pow! Thwack! Bamf!

Ultimate Spider-Man — Miles Morales is the teenage superstar of the new spider-movie.

Divorced from the vibrant page layout, superhero stories can seem goofy. When Spider-Man is just lines on a page, you know how seriously to take his battles with Mysterio, the guy with the glowing fishbowl for a head. But every live action superhero movie since Tim Burton’s Batman has had to add a line or two about how funny it is that a guy dresses up like a bat to fight crime, because it’s frankly ridiculous to pretend people act like this in real life.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse uses animation to embrace the conceits and eccentricities of comics. It takes its cues more from Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. It also takes as its jumping off point a very comic premise, the “what if?” story. Sure, everybody knows Spider-Man is Peter Parker — a white, working class college student and cub news photographer raised by his aunt in Brooklyn. But what if Spider-Man was a Brooklyn teenager named Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) raised by a Latinx nurse (Luna Lauren Velez) and a black police officer (Brian Tyree Henry). And also, there are five other spider-folk.

Now, we’re getting comic book-y! Publishers like Marvel beta testing new takes on their cash cow characters led to superhero comics being the first sci fi-adjacent genre to embrace multiverse theory, which solves some issues in quantum mechanics by positing that ours is one of an infinite expanse of parallel universes where everything that can happen, does happen. Super-mobster Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) hires super scientist Olivia Octavius (Kathryn Hahn) to build a machine to access these parallel dimensions so he can retrieve fresh versions of his deceased wife and child.

Naturally, Peter Parker (Chris Pine) tries to stop him from running an unlicensed particle accelerator in Kings County. But when he fails, it’s up to Miles, who has been freshly bitten by a radioactive spider, to save reality. Since Miles can’t figure out how to stick (and more importantly, unstick) to walls yet, he needs help, which comes in the form of alternate spider-people. Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), is a down-on-his-luck, freshly divorced, middle age spider-dude. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) is from a dimension where the radioactive spider bit Peter Parker’s crush instead instead of him. Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage) is a hardboiled, arachnid-themed crime fighter from a black-and-white universe. Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn) co-pilots a mecha with an intelligent radioactive spider. And Peter Porker (John Mulaney) was bitten by a radioactive pig.

Freed from the dubious need for plausibility, Into the Spider-Verse spins wild visuals. Each character is drawn in the style of their own comics. Peter Porker, who looks like a Looney Tunes character, drops anvils on people and assaults his enemies with a giant cartoon hammer. Peni has an anime-inspired, epilepsy-unfriendly transformation sequence. The animators sometimes divide the frame into panel-like spaces. “Thwip” and “Pow!” appear to punctuate the action. During the dizzying finale, in which a newly empowered Miles tries to stuff the interdimensional genie back in the bottle, gravity and reality fail, and abstract bits of Brooklyn float by.

Impossible shots coupled with a breezy screenplay make this the most fun superhero movie since Sam Raimi shot an upside down Toby Maguire kissing Kirsten Dunst. With Marvel building toward an illusory finale and DC dead in the water, this is the fresh approach the genre needs. Don’t just take inspiration from cartoons, be a cartoon.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

When you’re a film critic, you have to watch a lot of crap. It’s right there in the job description: I watch crap so you don’t have to. But what I don’t think I was prepared for was the sheer shoddiness of some of the films I see. I’m not talking about the kind of corner-cutting you see on low-budget pictures. I’m talking about poor craftsmanship in studio blockbusters. You’d think if you’re spending $200 million on a production, you would at least care enough to make it look good on screen. It’s disheartening to see stuff like Transformers: The Last Knight, where the special effects finale included terrible composite jobs and recycled stock footage. If they don’t care about their product, why should I?

That’s one of the reasons critics like Wes Anderson. His work can be truly great, like The Royal Tennenbaums or Moonrise Kingdom; or divisive, like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or head-scratchingly misguided, like The Darjeeling Limited. But at least it’s never shoddy. Even when it doesn’t work, you can tell he and his team are paying attention to detail, making each individual shot look the best it can.

I guess what I’m saying is, in my reviews, even if you fail, you get points for honestly trying — and deductions for cynical, advertising-driven cash grabs that are directly proportional to the size of your budget. So when I see a film that is both as lovingly crafted and as emotionally resonant as Isle of Dogs, I’m gonna praise it like it was Medicare for All.

Wes Anderson celebrates his love for dogs and Japanese culture in Isle of Dogs.

This film is about two things: Anderson’s love of dogs, and his love of Japanese culture. Isle of Dogs‘ prologue is a Noh drama about “a little samurai” lovingly staged in flawless stop motion, complete with black-clad stagehands the audience is trained to ignore. Right from the beginning, Anderson uses layers and layers of artifice stacked together to reach for something higher. But his little curlicues, which have in the past threatened to overwhelm the bigger picture, are here focused on the story. The Noh bit sets up the history of the powerful, cat-loving Kobayashi family before flashing forward to the near future, where Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) rules fictional Megasaki City. The mayor uses the cover of a dog flu epidemic to banish all of the city’s dogs to Trash Island, which prompts his ward Atari (Koyu Rankin) to steal an airplane and fly to rescue his beloved pet, Spots (Liev Schreiber).

Atari’s landing skills are not great, so he quickly finds himself needing a rescue. Fortunately, he’s found by a pack of heroic dogs, voiced by Anderson regulars: Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Duke (Jeff Goldblum). They take the “Little Pilot” under their paws and help him navigate treacherous Trash Island in search of his lost dog. Meanwhile, Professor Watanabe (Akira Ito) and his assistant Yoko Ono (voiced by the actual Yoko Ono) search for a cure to dog flu, and an American exchange student named Tracy (Greta Gerwig) uses her school newspaper to unseat Mayor Kobayashi.

Anderson careens from one incredible set piece to another. Professor Watanabe’s lab comes right out of a Toho production like The Mysterians. The director uses Kobayashi’s brief visit to a sumo match as an excuse to create a fully realized arena tableau that echoes Raging Bull. The island where most of the adventure plays out provides endlessly varied environments, from orderly stacks of cubes made from compacted trash to a slimy toxic wasteland. Our canine heroes hide out in a hut made of discarded saki bottles that provide a luminous and colorful background. Unlike the finely polished (and criminally overlooked) Kubo and the Two Strings, Anderson foregrounds the stop motion process — like King Kong; the dogs’ fur is in constant motion, disturbed by the animator’s unseen fingers. But there are also some spectacular effects, such as when characters eyes well with artificial tears.

Anderson loves nothing more than making self-contained worlds that play by their own internal rules. But there’s an underlying melancholy to his work. His orderly creations are a way to provide escape from the chaos and pain of the real world, if only for a couple of hours. Isle of Dogs is twee as you would expect from Anderson making a movie about dogs, but the underlying hurt is much closer to the surface here than in an idyl like Moonrise Kingdom, and that gives it a fairy-tale vibe. This is a kids movie that knows the kids can handle the darkness better than the grown ups.