Laborious Aesthetics: Visible and Invisible Labor in the Spider-Verse franchise

Abstract

This article explores the ‘laborious aesthetics’ of the Spider-Verse films, a set of animation techniques that highlight and romanticize the laboriousness of the franchise’s animation style. These techniques, including hand-drawn effects, stylistic variation, single-frame aesthetics, and sequences of industrial reflexivity, create an impression of creative abundance that invites forensic levels of scrutiny – such as frame-by-frame analysis – from fans on social media platforms. This laborious appreciation of creative labor becomes especially significant in light of reports of unsustainable labor practices during the production of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). The article argues that, by making the films’ abundance of creative labor seem completely visible, the Spider-Verse films’ laborious aesthetics function as a smokescreen for the actual exploitative conditions of the films’ production, the traces of which are not visible in the films’ spectacular images but instead stem from the deeper structures of computer animation production.

Keywords

animation labor computer animation Easter eggs fan labor participatory culture single-frame aesthetics

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