Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Movie)

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    How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Influenced the New ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Movie

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    The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and other C.G.I. cartoons are taking a looser, imperfect approach. The style represents a shift made possible by Spidey’s success.When “TMNT,” a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated film, was released in 2007, the critic Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The New York Times that it offered “an impressive lack of visual texture.” She was not wrong. The eponymous reptiles are rendered in an inert computer-generated form, as if they were modeled from plastic and then put on a screen. Their green skin is dull and smooth.The same cannot be said for the turtles in the latest incarnation of the ooze-filled tale: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.” In this new film, released Wednesday, our heroes — Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael — appear to spring from a (talented) high school doodler’s notebook. Their bodies and faces are rendered with an imperfect sketchy quality that makes their eyes vivid and their smiles vibrant. Their greenness is distinctive and gains extra contours when reflected in New York’s neon lights.“Mutant Mayhem,” directed by Jeff Rowe, is representative of a larger shift that has occurred in the 16 years since “TMNT” was released. It’s part of a wave of films that proves computer-generated animation doesn’t have to look quite so, well, boring.The turtle heroes in “TMNT,” from 2007, look as though they are molded from plastic.Imagi Animation StudiosThere’s an imperfect quality to the heroes in the new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.”Paramount PicturesSo what happened? Well, in 2018, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was released. “Into the Spider-Verse” — along with its even more technically virtuosic sequel, “Across the Spider-Verse” this summer — bucked the trend of modern animation by invoking its hero’s comic-book origins with Ben-Day dots and wild, hallucinogenic sequences.Since “Into the Spider-Verse” became a box office hit as well as an Oscar winner, major studios have grown less fearful of animation that diverges from the norm. The film proved that audiences wouldn’t reject projects that look markedly different from the house styles of Pixar (“Toy Story”) and DreamWorks (“Shrek”). Films like “Mutant Mayhem,” “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and “Nimona” all have distinctive looks that are visually sensational without conforming to established playbooks.It’s exciting for the filmmakers, too. “All animators ever did before that was have lunch with each other and bitch about how all animated movies look the same,” Mike Rianda, director of “The Mitchells,” told me in an interview. (Rianda is a member of SAG-AFTRA and spoke before the strike.)Rianda — who worked on that movie alongside Rowe, its co-director — was developing it at Sony Pictures Animation while “Into the Spider-Verse” was in the works. (Both were produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; “The Mitchells” was eventually released on Netflix in 2021.) “The Mitchells,” about a kooky family’s road trip during an A.I. takeover, looks like a window into the overstimulated mind of its teenage heroine, Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), an exuberant film geek — and Rianda and Rowe wanted the animation to have all of her quirks. They felt that the humans should look imperfect and asymmetrical rather than like Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” because the plot concerned a battle between Homo sapiens weirdos and regulated robots. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” blended techniques from 3-D C.G.I. with hand-drawn animated looks.Sony PicturesStill, there was pressure from the studio to go the standard route. “That’s easy,” Rianda said. “The computer knows how to do that. It’s already been taught that. It was wonderful to have ‘Spider-Verse’ going on in the next room so we could point to it and say, ‘Look, they’re doing it. We can do it too, right?’”Films like “Into the Spider-Verse,” and those that have followed in its footsteps, blend animation techniques that are common in 3-D computer-generated movies with those that were commonplace in the 2-D hand-drawn animation that preceded it. It’s not just that the images are less photorealistic, the movements of the characters are as well. The results are more broadly impressionistic in the ways that Looney Tunes cartoons, Disney classics or decades of anime have been.For instance, when the cat hero of “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” sticks his sword into the thumbnail of a giant in the bravura musical opening sequence, the sky goes yellow as the giant gasps with pain. The giant’s thumb turns red, and white lines reverberate in the background mimicking the throbbing.“The Last Wish,” directed by Joel Crawford, is linked to the era of animation dominated by C.G.I.; it is a spinoff of “Shrek,” a hallmark of that time. For Crawford, “Into the Spider-Verse” showed studios that “audiences were not only accepting of different styles but craved it because you get the same thing over and over.”Crawford wanted to keep Puss recognizable to fans, but put him in the context of a “fairy tale painting.” That meant rendering his fur more as brushstrokes rather than strands. Fur is actually a good barometer of the shift. In the 2022 DreamWorks caper “The Bad Guys,” which follows a group of animal criminals, the wolf ringleader’s coat looks like it has been shaped by pen strokes, a change from the way his fuzzier lupine brethren were crafted in Disney’s 2016 comedy “Zootopia.”With “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” the director Joel Crawford aimed for a “fairy tale painting.”DreamWorks AnimationBut all the animation directors I spoke with argued that the art has to come from a thematically relevant place. For “Nimona,” now on Netflix, the directors Troy Quane and Nick Bruno landed on what they described as a “two-and-a-half-D” style that evoked medieval paintings, a fitting look for their graphic-novel adaptation set in a futuristic world with the chivalrous customs of the Middle Ages. A trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Wish” has an illustrated quality in line with its storybook fable plot about a star descending from the sky. The effect is something out of an Arthur Rackham illustration or a Beatrix Potter book mashed up with “Frozen.”Rowe’s initial goal for “Mutant Mayhem” was just to be as bold as possible, excising any timidity he had felt about pushing boundaries on “The Mitchells.” As he spent more time working on the world of the Turtles, he figured out where those impulses were coming from and how they’d fit into the story. He and the production designer, Yashar Kassai, rediscovered drawings they had done as teenagers. “There’s just this unmitigated expression and honesty to those kinds of drawings,” Rowe said. “It’s a movie about teenagers; that’s our North Star. Let’s commit to the art style looking like it was made by teenagers. Ideally the world and the characters will look like they drew themselves.”As a viewer, I find it’s invigorating to see the animators on “Mutant Mayhem” quite literally coloring outside the lines. When the turtles jump across rooftops, the moon behind them appears to be vibrating scribbles. You can see (digital) pen lines in explosions and expressions.“At first ‘Spider-Verse’ gave people permission,” Rowe said. “And now I think with ‘Spider-Verse 2,’ it’s made it a mandate. I think if anyone makes a film that looks like a C.G. 3-D film from the last 30 years now, it’s going to feel dated.” For audiences, that’s great news. More

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      Air Jordans on the Big Screen: When the Sneaker Is the Real Star

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      “Air” tells the origin story of the iconic brand, but it’s long had a hold on Hollywood, from “Do the Right Thing” to “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”In “Air,” the new biographical sports drama about Nike’s 1984 effort to land an endorsement deal with then-N.B.A. rookie Michael Jordan, the Air Jordan is the sneaker holy grail. Designed by the eccentric genius Peter Moore, the sleek, stylish basketball shoe seems not so much created as discovered — as if, Moore says in the film, “it’s always been here,” much the way Michelangelo found his sculptures “already complete within the marble block.”The film, directed by Ben Affleck, tells the story of how the Air Jordan came to be. If anything, the movie undersells the Air Jordan’s pop cultural significance: Almost as soon as the sneaker was released, it become a phenomenon, not only raising the ceiling for shoe sales but also redefining the very limits of footwear success. In the four decades since its debut, the Air Jordan has continued to thrive: Jordan Brand, now a subsidiary of Nike, earned more than $5 billion in sales in 2022. Retro Air Jordan releases often sell out in minutes, with aftermarket demand routinely driving resale prices into four figures and beyond.Before its reverent screen treatment in “Air,” the Air Jordan already had an important place in movie history, as the unheralded star — sometimes central, sometimes lurking in the background — of countless motion pictures. To better understand how the shoe’s role in pop culture has evolved over the years, we looked back at some of its most notable big-screen appearances.1989‘Do the Right Thing’In a famous scene in Spike Lee’s Brooklyn-set “Do the Right Thing,” the chippy Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) is looking fresh in a clean pair of Air Jordan 4s — until a run-in with a boorish local gentrifier (John Savage) leaves them lamentably scuffed. “You stepped on my brand-new white Air Jordans I just bought!” Buggin Out howls in outrage.It’s an unforgivable affront, and one any sneakerhead knows all too well: Like a dent in a new car, a scuff is hard to come back from. And as the scene makes amusingly clear, a brand-new pair of Jordans isn’t cheap — even in 1989. “How much did you pay for those, man?” a friend asks, indignant on Buggin’s behalf. Other pals chime in: “A hundred bucks! American dollars! A hundred and eight with tax!”This scene quickly achieved a kind of immortality among sneaker collectors, and in 2017, Jordan Brand paid tribute to the film with a special-edition release. The exclusive Jordan 4s were designed to look exactly like the ones Buggin Out wore — complete with replica scuff.1996‘Space Jam’For Jordan’s much-anticipated screen debut, it was only reasonable that His Airness should don an exclusive set of kicks. “Space Jam” — in which Jordan, playing himself, helps Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes defeat the evil alien Nerdlucks on the court — saw the unveiling of the Air Jordan 11 in an exclusive white, black and purple colorway, featured prominently throughout the film’s climactic game.Although the movie came out in 1996, at what was arguably the height of Jordan’s N.B.A. career, the shoe was not made available until 2000, when it instantly became a collector’s item. (It was rereleased in 2009 and again in 2016.) To this day, the Space Jam Jordan remains one of the most beloved editions of the popular silhouette — and the film remains one of the most enduring love letters to the beauty of the shoe.1998‘He Got Game’Spike Lee had deep ties with Nike going back to 1986 when he played Mars Blackmon in his debut feature, “She’s Gotta Have It,” later reprising the role in a series of TV commercials for the Air Jordan. When he set out to make “He Got Game,” he leveraged that connection, managing to secure a pair of then-unreleased Jordan 13s months before they were available to the public or even worn by Jordan himself on the court.Denzel Washington stars as Jake Shuttlesworth, a convict offered a chance for a commuted life sentence if he can persuade his estranged son, Jesus (Ray Allen), one of the country’s top high school basketball prospects, to enroll at the governor’s alma mater. Shortly after being let out on work release, Jake heads to a sneaker store, where the clerk (Avery Glymph) immediately shows off the latest Jordan model. “I was all about Jordans, and to have those shoes in my hands, knowing I was like the first person to hold them, was kind of cool,” Glymph told Andscape magazine in 2019.2013‘White House Down’The Air Jordan’s appeal is so democratic that in the action blockbuster “White House Down,” even the leader of the free world wears them. Jamie Foxx, as President James Sawyer, dons a pair of Air Jordan 4s in the fan-favorite Fire Red colorway, using them to sneak past armed terrorists during an attempted kidnapping and violent White House takeover. (“Get your hands off my Jordans!” Sawyer bellows, as one tenacious bad guy wrestles with him on the floor.) It’s a small appearance, but one that makes clear the Jordan’s ascendancy from basketball shoe to streetwear staple to common accessory with formal tailoring.2016‘Kicks’When Brandon (Jahking Guillory), a 15-year-old sneakerhead of limited means, lucks into a coveted pair of Air Jordan 1s for pennies on the dollar, they become his most prized possession, lifting his spirits and imbuing him with newfound confidence. He’s so in love with the shoes that he’s reluctant to do anything in them, sitting out a pickup game for fear they’ll get mussed. “They’re called Jordans,” his friend teases him. “He played basketball!”“Kicks,” an indie drama from the director Justin Tipping, follows Brandon as he tries to track down his Air Jordans after they’re stolen by gangsters, an adventure that puts him in danger. The film shows how desperately a kid like Brandon can pine after Jordans, and how Jordans can come to mean much more than footwear. “They’re not just shoes,” Brandon asserts at one point, and the film compellingly demonstrates that truth.2018‘Uncle Drew’The goofy sports satire “Uncle Drew” stars Dallas Mavericks point guard Kyrie Irving as the eponymous elderly basketball legend, a character he played in several popular Pepsi Max commercials in the early 2010s. But the movie is really about Dax (Lil Rel Howery), an amateur basketball coach with lofty aspirations who is struggling to make his sports dreams come true.Dax works a day job at Foot Locker, where he’s prevailed upon by his team’s vain and entitled star player, Casper (Aaron Gordon), to use his insider connections to buy every player a matching set of Jordan 11s. It’s a staggering expense he can barely afford, and it fails to prevent Casper from ditching his team for a rival’s soon afterward. Interestingly, the sneaker itself is the rereleased Space Jam Jordan 11 from 2016, drawing a connection between Irving’s Uncle Drew and the classic Michael Jordan film.2018‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’The single most iconic screen Jordan since “Space Jam” arrived in the animated superhero flick “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” The new Spider-Man Miles Morales (the voice of Shameik Moore) wears a pair of Air Jordan 1s in the original Chicago colorway, playfully loose, laces untied. (That is remarked upon so often that it becomes a running joke.) The sneakers are variously lingered over, zoomed in on and even featured prominently on the movie’s poster. The focus brought new attention to the classic sneaker, and introduced a generation of viewers to a shoe whose original heyday came before many of them were born. To commemorate the film, Jordan Brand released a special edition Jordan 1 with a distinctive webbed pattern, known as the Spider-Man Origin Story. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘United Shades of America’ and a Presidential Address

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      W. Kamau Bell’s documentary series returns with an episode on policing. And President Biden addresses a joint session of Congress.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 26-May 2. Details and times are subject to change.MondaySESAME STREET: 50 YEARS OF SUNNY DAYS 8 p.m. on ABC. This two-hour special looks at the ways in which “Sesame Street” has addressed social issues over the decades, centering the show’s recent efforts to diversify its lineup of muppets. Guests in the special include Gloria Estefan, Whoopi Goldberg, Lucy Liu and John Legend; the program would make a natural double feature paired with “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street,” a recent feature-length documentary that looks at the making of the show.TuesdayTANGLED (2010) 6 p.m. on Freeform. Rapunzel got revamped in this Disney adaptation, which updates the look and pacing of that princess tale, and adds music. The result is a “lavish, romantic musical fairy tale,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, adding that the film “has a story that takes some liberties with the genre; a nimble, kinetic visual style; and a willingness to marry complex psychology with storybook simplicity.”WednesdayPresident Biden speaking to the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate on April 23.Evan Vucci/Associated PressPRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS 9 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC and other networks (check local listings). President Biden will address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night, in keeping with the tradition of presidents to give such addresses, rather than an official State of the Union, in their inauguration year. The speech may address climate change and racial justice initiatives — particularly given that Biden will be speaking less than a week after he vowed that the United States would cut its global warming emissions at least in half by the end of the decade, and just over a week after the former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis.EMMA (2020) 5:20 p.m. on HBO Signature. Anya Taylor-Joy was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as the “handsome, clever and rich” title character in this latest movie adaptation of the Jane Austen novel “Emma.” The story, about romantic entanglements among members of the upper class in the Georgian-era English countryside, is given a candy coating here by the director Autumn de Wilde, whose carefully-crafted, striking color palette may bring to mind another filmmaking confectioner. “It initially seems that de Wilde has adapted the material using Wes Anderson software,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. But, Dargis, added, “after a while, the Anderson-ish tics become less noticeable, and both the emotions and overall movie more persuasive. Much of this has to do with the pleasure of watching people fall on their faces — and in love — and with the suppleness of the largely note-perfect cast.”ThursdayA scene from “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”Sony Pictures AnimationSPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018) 8 p.m. on FX. Spider-Man took his best-received swing through New York in years with “Into the Spider-Verse,” an animated action movie that reimagines the web-spewing hero as Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a Brooklyn middle schooler who learns that he’s one of many Spider-Man heroes from different dimensions. A.O. Scott called the movie “fresh and exhilarating” in his review for The Times. “The story,” Scott wrote, “is clever and just complicated enough, moving quickly through silly bits, pausing for moments of heart-tugging sentiment, and losing itself in wild creative mischief.”FridayINTERNATIONAL JAZZ DAY 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This year’s International Jazz Day All-Star Global Concert, with Herbie Hancock, Andra Day and many others, will be broadcast online in a livestream on YouTube and other sites beginning at 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday. On TV, PBS will air this compilation of archival performances from International Jazz Day concerts from the past decade. Selections include performances by Hancock, Wynton Marsalis, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Annie Lennox and Hugh Masekela.SaturdayJohn David Washington, left, and Robert Pattinson in “Tenet.”Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros.TENET (2020) 8 p.m. on HBO. Christopher Nolan’s latest sci-fi brain tickler was technically released in theaters late last summer, but most people didn’t take the pandemic-era risk involved in watching it — so Saturday’s HBO release should stoke fresh discussion among new audiences about what the labyrinthine, time-bending plot is actually about. The film stars John David Washington as a C.I.A. agent tasked with taking down a villainous businessman, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). Doing so requires working with an ally played by Robert Pattinson and Sator’s younger wife (Elizabeth Debicki), an art dealer who is undervalued by her husband. Washington’s character, Jessica Kiang wrote in her review for The Times, is “basically James Bond, forward and backward, a kind of 00700, right down to the occasional wry one-liner.” The movie itself, Kiang added, “is undeniably enjoyable, but its giddy grandiosity only serves to highlight the brittleness of its purported braininess.”INSPIRING AMERICA: THE 2021 INSPIRATION LIST 8 p.m. on NBC and Telemundo. The NBC anchors Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb will host the first edition of this new annual event, which recognizes influential people who have used their platforms in positive ways. This year’s honorees include Bubba Wallace, José Andrés and Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, who are slated to be interviewed during Saturday night’s broadcast.SundayUNITED SHADES OF AMERICA 10 p.m. on CNN. The comedian W. Kamau Bell’s documentary series returns for a sixth season on Sunday night, with a timely episode about the history of policing in America. Bell, who was born in the Bay Area, focuses on Oakland, Calif., and the surrounding area, speaking with politicians, organizers and members of law enforcement about the state of policing in the country.THE APU TRILOGY (1955-1959) 8 p.m. on TCM. The Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s much-acclaimed trilogy about a Bengali boy becoming a man — Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959) — are best viewed together. TCM is showing them back-to-back on Sunday night, starting at 8 p.m. (All three films are also available to stream on the Criterion Channel, for those who don’t want to stay up late to catch “The World of Apu.”) More