Peter Ramsey makes elaborate animation worth watching for the people in it. His shared direction of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse earns our warm recommendation, with a caveat about action that sometimes overwhelms its characters.
Fi1m perspective
Miles Morales has to learn how to be a hero while competing animation styles make demands on our attention. In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), the directors keep his efforts easy to understand without making the pictures simple. We were moved by Miles because we could follow his difficulties even when there was so much else to look at. Ramsey is worth following for that care with a character, though this is a shared achievement and should be treated as one.
His earlier work helps explain the attention to images: he began with storyboards and production illustration in live action, then took on second-unit directing. He was a storyboard artist on Fight Club (1999), before making his feature directing debut with Rise of the Guardians (2012). That move into animation gave him another way to pursue stories about fear, belief and belonging. These interests help explain why his handling of Miles works: becoming a hero matters because we are already interested in the person attempting it. We have someone to care about before we have taken in all the visual information.
Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman share the direction of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with Ramsey, and Shameik Moore voices Miles. Together, they make the familiar process of learning to be a superhero feel worth revisiting. The film's affection for him matters as much as its interest in how comic books look. Our reservation comes when the action gets so busy that the people become harder to follow. Those passages are frustrating precisely because the directors have done the harder work of making us interested in them.
His subsequent directing work includes the miniseries Lost Ollie (2022) and an episode of The Mandalorian in 2023. The latter takes him into live-action television after the animated features, drawing on experience that began well before his feature debut. We would seek him out for the attention to people that makes Miles matter, whatever the format. Start with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and accept that some of its action could use a little less happening at once.
Biography
Peter Ramsey is an American illustrator, storyboard artist and filmmaker. He began his career as a storyboard artist and production illustrator on numerous live-action films, including Men in Black (1997), Fight Club (1999), Minority Report (2002) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). He also worked as second unit director on films such as Godzilla (1998) and Panic Room (2002).
Ramsey directed the DreamWorks Animation feature Rise of the Guardians (2012). He co-directed Sony Pictures Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) with Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman. For the latter he shared the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, becoming the first African American to win in that category. He has also directed episodes of the series The Mandalorian (2019).
