If the largely shared enhanced abilities of the majority of the characters populating the film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse can be tidily summed up as allowing them to do whatever a spider can, the film itself has its own startling superpower: It expands the possibilities of animated film. More accurately, I suppose, the film, co-directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson, takes advantage of boundless possibilities of animation in a way that most of its peers across the multiplex can’t be bothered with. The same observation can be applied to the sequel’s predecessor, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, without raising too many contrary arguments. In some respects, the new film goes bigger, expanding on the multiverse variations of the costumed do-gooder co-created by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko some sixty years ago in a way that approaches exponential levels. More importantly, the animated feature takes the affection heaped on the earlier installment as a green light to let imaginations run wild.

Like other entertainments presided over by the team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who are among the credited screenwriters and producers, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse put a stress test on pop culture structures erected long ago. In particular, the film toys with the idea of canon as it applies to characters who are routinely reimagined, such as the superheroes who have taken up permanent residence in every nook of the entertainment-industrial complex. The plot is too dense to recount in the number of words I’m willing to devote to the task. In an admittedly reductive recounting, it follows Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) as he is again drawn into an adventure that involves interacting with a slew of other figures who wearing a similar costume and sling familiar webs in alernate dimensions. Whether the assembled army of Spider-Men that are trying to maintain timeline balance are making the correct choices in their finessing of free will is the muddy moral question at the film’s core. How that fiction mirrors the storyteller’s dilemma as they weight the dueling impulses to meet or thwart expectations is the true preoccupation of the film.

There are pleasures to be taken from the conceptual knots the film gleefully ties; it genuinely deserves to inspire the sort of THC-tilted dorm room conversations that Lee and his bullpen of rascally writers actively aimed for in the nineteen-seventies. There are also vocal performances worth celebrating: Hailee Steinfeld is miles ahead of everyone else as Gwen Stacy, but new recruits Daniel Kaluuya and Issa Rae merit a Bullpen Bulletins shout out for their efforts as distinctively different spider-people. Truly, though, it’s the ranging vibrancy of the animation that elevates the film. The imagery is astounding pliable, shifting to reflect and enhance the emotions of scenes or fortify the identities of characters on screen. In a way that should be routine for animated films, every stylistic choice tells its own, nearly complete story.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is too long. That’s where it’s most conventional as a modern movie blockbuster. In this instance, that flaw is exacerbated by the fact that it is deliberately designed as the first of two parts, its conclusion scheduled for release in a little less than a year. That’s the nature of the modern Hollywood beast, but it’s still a little dispiriting. Even as the film leaves the audience wanting more, its a shame that the craving is forcibly imposed instead of being left to choice and discernment. It would have triumphed either way.