When Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse dropped in late 2018, it promptly redefined a LOT of things for a LOT of people. On its face, it checked all the boxes for something that could’ve flown under the radar: an animated family film about a superhero’s origin story, from a studio with … mixed, to put it mildly … success with the Spider-Man intellectual property.

So why didn’t it fly under the radar? Because Spider-Verse is, from the very first frame to the very final one, complete magic. Not only did it win the Academy Award in its category, it won against a Pixar film—the first time a non-Disney/Pixar film won Best Animated Feature in nearly a decade. By the time it left theaters in 2019, it was on nearly every major critics’ top ten list—and many outlets placed it among the very best films of its decade.

In this installment of Frame Rate, Dan and Patrick talk about some of the (seemingly infinite) threads with which Into the Spider-Verse spins its magic.