Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is hard to describe to those who haven’t seen it. The huge amount of characters on the screen at any time, the beauty of its composition, the kinetics of its action, the sheer variety of its artistry—it’s a stunning visual achievement. And, as we’ve seen far too often recently, this achievement seems to have come at a major cost to the animators that created that beauty, both literally and figuratively.
With information gleaned from four pseudonymous sources, Vulture reports that working on the animation of the Into the Spider-Verse sequel was a nightmare—one so bad that reportedly over 100 animators quit due to the working conditions during production. These included working 11 hours a day, seven hours a week, for more than a year, and for a salary that was only appropriate when it included overtime pay for the grueling labor. The time-crunch is attributed to, among other things, a short production time while producer Phil Lord slowly approved layouts, leaving animators without any work to do for three months or more.
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But the bigger issue seems to be that Lord would also demand edits even after scenes had been finished and approved by the film’s actual directors (Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers), forcing employees to rework virtually all the animation. As one of Vulture’s sources explains it:
“The changes in the writing would go through storyboarding. Then it gets to layout, then animation, then final layout, which is adjusting cameras and placements of things in the environment. Then there’s cloth and hair effects, which have to repeatedly be redone anytime there’s an animation change. The effects department also passes over the characters with ink lines and does all the crazy stuff like explosions, smoke, and water. And they work closely with lighting and compositing on all the color and visual treatments in this movie. Every pass is plugged into editing. Smaller changes tend to start with animation, and big story changes can involve more departments like visual development, modeling, rigging, and texture painting. These are a lot of artists affected by one change. Imagine an endless stream of them.”
None of the workers disparage the finished movie, which does look absolutely incredible, but rather the unnecessarily arduous way it was completed. Another source explains it best: “The analogy for the way Phil works, it’s getting a whole bunch of construction workers to make a building without a blueprint. You get them to start putting bricks on top of each other. You get the wood guys to put the wood in, put the windows in, get some metal scaffold in there. And he’s like, “Nah, knock that part down. But show me some construction worker who can put bricks on top of each other again and again then watch it get knocked down on a daily basis.”
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In seeking official response to some of the concerns raised in Vulture’s reporting, Amy Pascal, former Sony Pictures Entertainment chairperson and a producer on multiple Sony Spider-Man films, including Into and Across, said of claims that previously finalized shots would be re-done over and over, “If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is… I guess, welcome to making a movie.”
The entire report is an engrossing, if somewhat depressing read, especially since Across the Spider-Verse is hardly the only instance of studios taking advantage of their animators. I highly recommend you go check it out, and the next time you watch Across—or Beyond the Spider-Verse, the end of the trilogy, which Sony has planned to be released just next year, a fact some animators in the report deem almost impossible—think about the price of what you’re seeing. It’s more than just a movie ticket.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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