Spider-Verse artists say working on the sequel was ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’

Man. There's so many things to comment on.

It's pretty terrible being an animator. You work long hours with low pay. You're expected to want to do it and suffer because of passion. It's a very difficult industry to get people to band together and fight for more pay and better working conditions because everyone wants to show they can do it.

I've worked in the industry for a bit. But I couldn't last because of that.

Animating is also pretty tedious and difficult so them having to redo finished scenes over and over is really painful and demoralising. And you don't even have anything to show for it since someone else edits your work in this case.

It's not like it has to be this way. There is already an established animation pipeline where you have to confirm most things in pre-production. They're just not doing it.

In terms of art direction, I've always wondered how they planned everything beforehand. That movie looks like it required a lot of planning and forethought. Especially to see how the different styles could work together.

Discovering that they didn't really plan and made animators redo final renders.. Kind of made sense. But not in a positive way.

It kind of sucks for future animators because the movie was so good. As in, the producers are just going to keep working like this because they can and they produce results.

How do you fight against that?

But also this:

They’ve announced that Beyond the Spider-Verse will be released in March of next year. I’ve seen people say, “Oh, they probably worked on it at the same time.” There’s no way that movie’s coming out then. There’s been progress on the pre-production side of things. But as far as the production side goes, the only progress that’s been made on the third one is any exploration or tests that were done before the movie was split into two parts. Everyone’s been fully focused on Across the Spider-Verse and barely crossing the finish line. And now it’s like, Oh, yeah, now we have to do the other one.

I told my friend exactly this as I left the theater. "I'm sure they've already done a lot of it if the deadline is March"

Wow. Guess I was wrong. I'm mentally preparing myself for a delay.

I feel bad because I think Across the Spider-Verse looked really good, which almost validates Lord's horrible management style. It doesn't need to be like that though, but executives won't care if the movie makes them money and it doesn't cause too much controversy.

As a graphic designer though, I partly understand some of what the illustrators probably go through, long periods of sitting around waiting for decisions to be made, only to get epic fucktons of work dropped on them at the last minute and having to grind everything out working long hours to meet unrealistic deadlines, only to have to work even longer hours at the last minute when some higher-up makes an arbitrary decision to change something that was approved long ago in the preliminary stages.

I feel so bad for those people working on the films, but... I appreciate what they created, for whatever that's worth (nothing).

Well damn. This was disturbing to read. I honestly believe the animators interviewed are telling the truth, if only because of my knowledge of how the industry works from friends who have experience or are trying to break into it. Hollywood is predatory on all fronts, as shown by the current strikes, but animators are among some of the worst in the industry.

What's bad is that it's a career field that draws in the most passionate people, making them more vulnerable. People will work in all sorts of conditions trying to break into the industry, and they want to use their passion on a project they love. Across the Spiderverse was a film oozing that passion and love for the medium of animation. It's the kind of film people would want to stick on despite the horrible conditions, because deep down they want to say they had a hand in it.

All too often it ends in horrific burnout. What's worse is that the skills for animation are so specialized, that it limits what else you can do. One of my friends left the industry after severe burnout and is currently struggling to figure out what the heck to do with his life. He doesn't even like sharing his art due to the inevitable requests to draw or do commissions, animation burnt him out that badly.

Spiderverse is amazing, but the production process described should NOT be the norm. When I saw the March 2024 release date I thought they worked on both parts in tandem, but this is just a chilling revelation that they didn't.

It just makes me think of all the game development horror stories. Like how people had to sleep at the offices while testing Red Dead Redemption 2, or how Cyberpunk 2077 had all those delays. Pretty sure the public announcement of the original release date was the first the developer team had heard of the date, the date was chosen without consulting them whatsoever. After this article, I suspect the exact same is happening at Sony with Beyond the Spiderverse.

Thing is, while the production process is awful, I do think that Spiderverse is important in showing how animated movies need a change in direction when it comes to presentation and style. In recent years animated movies have been focusing more and more on "realism": realistic movements, realistic textures... They're cartoony, but they haven't been fully stylized, so it all feels pretty stale.

That's what I appreciate about the Spiderverse series the most. It reminded me in that animation, anything can happen. You're not constrained by basic physics and limitations of the human body, and you don't need to stick to making sure everything looks realistic but still cartoony. It felt like a return to the roots of Looney Tunes, a reminder of the infinite potential of the medium.

That's the takeaway I want other studios to have from the films. To get more experimental with the art and presentation, to remember that the potential of animation goes beyond just having believable talking or anthropomorphic animals, or superpowers and magic. That you don't need to worry constantly about a person's movement looking natural, that you can still have them do Looney Tunes-style stretches and leave dust clouds when they run. That you can do more to stylize it than just stuff like super-thin limbs or body proportions, that the shading and colors can be part of the stylization too.

Just don't put animators through hell to do it.

One more note that kept popping into my head as I read the article: does Phil Lord have aphantasia? They all mentioned how he'd always get involved at the end stages, and couldn't seem to visualize the result until he saw the final renders. Aphantasia would explain at least some of that. If he does, surely they can find some better way to work around it that doesn't require the scenes to be fully rendered.

I came in here thinking "oh, they're probably talking about all the post-render 2D animation and background work that they had to work which made the 3D animation nearly redundant", but no, it looks like people were legitimately wrecked by this production.

I have to say that although I loved the movie and the technical work on the animation, I disagree with the idea that the results validate the methods used to produce them. Hard work is one thing, but if you are constantly telling an artist to throw away their work because you have changed your mind on what you wanted, it's no wonder that the artist would quit. When your cut scenes add up to more than the runtime of the movie you're producing, you know you're not doing a good job of producing a movie even if the movie is excellent. Heck, keeping the project under budget and on time are the major responsibilities of a producer! As it is, it looks like Lord really wanted to be the director, not a producer.

It looked really great but I told my friends who watched with me that the phrase, "too many cooks in the kitchen" comes to mind. Just trying to be everything at all times, so to hear about this is very fitting.

That doesn't really surprise me, the hard work put in really shows. What I don't get is why were the animators overworked despite the fact that there's a 5 year gap between the original and the sequel? This also sets precedent for the threequel (Beyond the Spider-Verse) to be have a significant delay as well