You Get Used To Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’s Animation, And The Show’s Good – Forbes
Spider-ManI did not really know what to expect from Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in the wake of the hard-to-surpass X-Men 97 and the not-that-good What If…? which just ended its three season run. All you could really take away from the previews was just how…weird it looked, with its animation style that was somehow both flat and 3D at the same time, with an off-puttingly low framerate on top of that.Having watched the first two episodes this week now, I can say that yes, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a very good series. And it is a very good series where you you will actually get used to that animation very quickly, and it’s just not distracting the way you might imagine it would be. In fact, the show has really cool action sequences, and it uses this comic-ish look to really lean into that concept, occasionally breaking up into actual panels. I mean, it’s not my favorite art style ever, certainly, but it does work, and if you don’t like it, you will sort of just forget about it in time.No, I am not going to compare this to the sky-high quality of X-Men 97, but Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is very charming, and I actually laughed out loud in a few instances. After seeing Spider-Man fight literal space gods and multiversal villains recently, it’s nice to see an action sequence where he fights a villain in a pet shop and bumbles around trying to save corgis and fish from danger.Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-ManThe show does mostly skip Peter’s Spidey origin, altering it to him being bit by a spider that drops through a (spoilers) Doctor Strange portal, likely alien in origin (Strange is fighting a symbiote, after all). We skip ahead to the early days of Spiderdom where Pete has a goofy but endearing suit with a web tank on his back and actual tubes leading into his arm shooters. Yes, they get caught on things. This show does great with details.The cast is another aspect I found interesting, with Pete paired with Nico, a different best-friend figure than we’ve normally seen. He has a different crush, her different “bully” boyfriend that turns out to immediately be a really cool dude, flipping some tropes on their head. There are also clearly going to be a wide array of Marvel characters brought in here. We open with Strange. Daredevil is promised. Peter is currently working with future Hulk Amadeus Cho. I’m sure a lot will happen in these ten episodes, airing over just four weeks.You can’t expect X-Men 97 here, but if you’re off-put by its previews, if you’re a Spider-fan I would definitely watch it as it’s genuinely hard not to like, and the animation isn’t as much of a roadblock as you might imagine.Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site’s Terms of Service. We’ve summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:So, how can you be a power user?Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site’s Terms of Service.
