In December of 2018, I walked into a little theater in Brooklyn to watch Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with my dad and brother. I still remember putting on the 3D glasses and eating pretzels that my dad had brought in his bag—theater popcorn wasn’t, and still isn’t, worth the price. The trailers played, the movie began, and I was blown away. Like many of my generation, this movie was my first notable experience with hybrid animation. Featuring 3D models blending with the iconic comic book style with dynamic action, it broke through any expectations that I had walking into the theater. While this may have been the first time many became aware of this animation style, it certainly isn’t the only usage of it.
Hybrid animation is the blending of different animation styles combining 2D hand-drawn cartoons with 3D computer-generated imagery. It’s been used in many movies since as early as 1985. At its inception, it was a huge step in movie making as a whole, presenting an entirely new way for the animators to grow and go beyond the borders that had been previously set. However, conversation about the style has only just started to gain traction. Why haven’t the numerous Disney movies that incorporated 3D animation into their 2D films been recognized? Movies like Pocahontas, The Prince of Egypt, and more, while considered to have amazing animation, weren’t truly acknowledged for the great innovation that was put into them. So what caused them to escape our attention? And what made Spider-Verse so different?
Hiding in Plain Sight
If you walked into a theater in 1996 and witnessed a setting entirely made from CGI run across by 2D characters that seemed to fit right in, what would you think? To us, a scene from The Great Mouse Detective clearly has CGI—there’s a solidity and smoothness to the gears and their movements that we’ve all seen before. But back then the idea of CGI was only a topic of discussion among animators and some critics. As far as the public knew, there were just some very talented artists behind this movie. While they wouldn’t be wrong to make that assumption, they didn’t understand the technology being used—and that was by design.
Back then the goal was for the movie to be assisted through the use of CGI, and while this resulted in one of the most impressive scenes of its time, it wasn’t meant to be known. Disney had a formula, one that they had built up over years since they began making movies in 1937, and the executives at the company were very protective of it. Any new ideas took hours of convincing from passionate artists to even be considered for the movie, and most of the time if those ideas didn’t have a substantial effect on profit they were swept under the rug. It was one of these chances that led to the first use of hybrid animation by Disney in The Black Cauldron.
In The Black Cauldron, CGI was used to make smoother scenes that added a sense of real movement that 2D animation couldn’t replicate, but it wasn’t meant to be noticed. While Disney was taking risks they weren’t trying to make an entirely new type of movie. Those risks were kept to a minimum and the result was a traditional Disney movie that happened to use CGI in a few small scenes.
Despite all of this, the movie could be a huge step for Disney, proving to the higher ups that CGI could be used in combination with 2D animation to create a more fluid style. But that’s not what happened, because The Black Cauldron was a complete failure.
At the time, the movie was the most expensive movie Disney had ever produced, with a budget of 44 million dollars (135 million today). It needed to be among the highest grossing movies of the year just to break even, but unfortunately it wasn’t. With a final income of 21 million, the movie lost Disney more than 20 million dollars and very nearly shut down the hybrid animation movement before it really started. Or it would have, if The Great Mouse Detective had not come out the year after.
The Great Mouse Detective is often credited with having saved Disney, as it was said to have revitalized Disney’s animation department and return a sense of wonder to the watchers that the past few movies had been missing. A major part of that success was due to the massive undertaking those animators took with the clocktower scene at the end of the movie, a masterclass of hybrid animation that completely overshadowed that used in all of The Black Cauldron in just over a minute.
This was the step Disney needed and its effects rippled throughout their filmmaking process. While you may have never looked that deeply into the use of CGI in these otherwise 2D Disney movies, I can guarantee that you have seen it in some other movies, from Tarzan to Kronk’s New Groove. The reason that it isn’t talked about very often is because throughout all of this, CGI was meant to cater to the Disney style and nothing more. But that would soon change with one major choice.
What Changed with Spider-Verse?
Until very recently, hybrid animation has only really been the implementation of CGI into 2D animation. But that changed in 2015 when Blue Sky Studios produced The Peanuts Movie and it officially became the first 3D movie to include 2D animation produced by a major film company. It opted for the use of cartoony linework to show movement, a choice that was made to feel reminiscent of the comic strip it was adapting. This was the first of its kind and those artistic choices elevated it past the good movie it was on its own. So why is The Peanuts Movie rarely associated with hybrid animation?
While The Peanuts Movie was the first time they had attempted to integrate this new style of animation, it wasn’t the kind of “different” that people were looking for. On the other hand, Spider-Verse was something entirely new. You’d struggle to find anything like it in terms of animation, even now that its style has become more popular. It’s become one of those pin points in film history—the kind that shifts the way movies are made—the way Toy Story was for the Pixar style and Tron did the same for CGI as a whole. So the real question is how? It’s different, yes but what made that difference? To find the answer to that I talked to Maria José Herrera, a production manager at Sony Pictures Image Works who worked on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and she was able to give me some insight on the process of both movies.
When talking about what inspired the style of Spider-Verse, Herrera emphasized the growing desire for something new within animation studios, reflecting the tastes of audiences. “We had seen how there was a lot of experimentation going on in a lot of the animation studios just to bring more novelty, to bring more of a different style, different experience to the viewers of animated content because the industry was not stuck, but it was kind of stale. It was kind of on the same, style of rendering and the same look that was expected that would be selling tickets on the box office and that people kind of got used to,” said Herrera.
The stale style Herrera was referencing was the Pixar style, having been popularized first by Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc. It focused on keeping the animation based in realism, with lighting acting as it would in real life. The style had taken over most of the animation industry and anything other than that was seen as an unnecessary gamble by executives. This style was what was used in The Peanuts Movie and what stopped it from standing out, it’s unwillingness to take that gamble, but the people working on Spider-Verse weren’t scared.
One of the most striking choices Spider-Verse made was the differing frames per second (fps) of the characters and the backgrounds. Usually animation happens at 24 fps, but the characters in Spider-Verse would skip frames, resulting in an fps of 8 or 12. As Herrera put it, “Miles and Gwen, like all the other characters, don’t have a fluid movement. They’re animated on less frames per second than a regular animated movie. So Miles and Gwen, for example, would be animated on twos, which means we were skipping frames.” The change on its own massively contributed to the look of the movie, but it also resulted in more freeze frames where the characters didn’t move at all and it was within these where the 2D aspects were implemented.
The overall goal of the Spider-Verse movies was for them to feel as if it was ripped straight from a marvel comic—exaggerated expressions, sound effect bubbles, moments where the entire movie goes into a backstory introduced with a comic book sliding across the screen, and the unique design of every single character. That goal is what fueled the use of hybrid animation, turning what could have been just another movie into a showing of what animation was evolving into, and that evolution can already be seen in the newer media coming out now.
What’s Next?
Since Spider-Verse opened the gates there have been a slew of new movies and series that use hybrid animation in a somewhat similar or entirely new way. In 2021, The Mitchells vs. the Machines was released by Sony, having been worked on by many of the same people from the Spider-Verse crew, including Herrera.
Rather than a constant flow of differing animation styles like in Spider-Verse it instead implemented 2D illustrations in key points of the movie that the production team would call “Katie Vision” (based on the name of the main character). “The Mitchells vs. the Machines was a little bit more simplified than Spider-Verse in the way that there’s not that much change. The whole movie kind of has a similar treatment. So Mitchells vs. the Machines was a test also to use the tools that we got from Spider-Verse and use them for another movie, just dialing a little differently and see how it went. The 2D style, it wasn’t inspired by comics, but it was more inspired on the character designers—Lindsey Olivares—style,” Herrera said, when speaking on the differences in the movie’s production.
Despite the use of the same tools and it being the work of the same people, Spider-Verse and The Mitchells vs. the Machines come across as two entirely different films, displaying the true potential of hybrid animation. Unlike previous innovations, hybrid animation is a great tool for expansion in all directions, not an override.
This can be seen in other new projects with hybrid animation such as The Wild Robot, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Arcane, Entergalactic, and more. Each of these incorporates 2D into 3D, but each one feels different. From the hand drawn textures used in The Wild Robot to the beautiful painted backgrounds used in Arcane, hybrid animation is artistic evolution at its finest. There will surely be more and we will surely go further because that’s the creative process—that’s art—but for now the “staleness” that had been built up over years of the same old, same old is being broken through, and we can only wait and see where it goes.
The overall goal of the Spider-Verse movies was for them to feel as if it was ripped straight from a marvel comic—exaggerated expressions, sound effect bubbles, moments where the entire movie goes into a backstory introduced with a comic book sliding across the screen, and the unique design of every single character. That goal is what fueled the use of hybrid animation, turning what could have been just another movie into a showing of what animation was evolving into, and that evolution can already be seen in the newer media coming out now.