Spider-Punk’s chaotic look had to break Across the Spider-Verse’s animation rules

Spider-Man: About the Spider-Verse features many different Spider-people from (haha) decades of Spider history. Despite all being connected by their powers (as well as catastrophic canon events, as we learn), they are all vibrant and different from each other. This was something the first movie accomplished, but with dozens and dozens of Spider-People in the sequel, About the Spider-Verse takes everything up to 11. It’s not just their character designs; it’s also the way they’re animated and the style in which they’re rendered.

Perhaps the most impressive Spider-Person – and certainly the one many fans have latched on to as the coolest – is Spider-Punk. Spider-Punk (aka Hobie Brown), voiced by Daniel Kaluuya, is a maverick punk rock hero who does things his own way. And that extends to how he looks and moves compared to the rest of the cast. Not only is his design something out of a zine collage, but he also moves more jerkily than the rest of the cast.

He’s one of the most dynamic characters in the whole movie – and also the one who has everyone amazed at how wild he looks.

“How the FUCK did they do this,” asked a Twitter user, sharing a clip of Spider-Punk’s chaotically cool intro.

The Spider-Verse animators have been very online and very open to talking about their process and animation leader Chelsea Gordon-Ratzlaff came in to respond. They described the rules the animation team had for Hobie, also clarifying that the rules were broken when necessary – a punk rock approach that Hobie would approve of.

these were our rules for hobie!

– body at 3s

– offset the vest (also at 3s but delayed by a frame or two)

– guitar on 4s

– outline at 2s (only when moving, must remain static when held still)

– recess around the guitar

What does all this mean? For most animated films, 24 frames per second is standard. Typically, animators change pose and details every second frame – or “on the 2s”. But in Hobie’s case, his body position changed every third frame, making his movements more staccato than the characters around him. But that’s not even the wildest part.

All of Hobie’s separate elements – his vest, his silhouette, his guitar – move on separate frames. With the vest being animated at an offset, this means it still changes in the third pose, but one frame away from the body (so if its body moves at frames 3, 6, 9, and 12, the vest moves at frames 4, 7, 10 and 13). In addition, the different Hobie parts had different textures, which changed based on what happened in the movie. After all, Hobie hates consistency.

When faced with something highly ambitious that seems impossible, animation studios innovate – and that means developing new software and tools to help them achieve what they want. (Obligatory mention of the groundbreaking snow simulation of Frozen that helped solve the Dyatlov Pass incident.) It was no different for Sony. Gordon-Ratzlaff says the “pipeline team has come up with all sorts of crazy things that let us do even crazier things in animation.”

And that shows in it About the Spider-Verse, which is by far the most visually daring American animated film in recent memory. It used everything from the first movie as a springboard and launched it to new heights. When Beyond the Spider-Verse coming out next year, it’s sure to be even more above and, well, beyond.