"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" animators laud movie's diversity

• Artists with Puerto Rican and Dominican origins, as well as animators from Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and more, were among the 1,000-member crew that gave life to the story. The movie is already getting rave reviews.

Context: One of the movie's protagonists is Miles Morales, an Afro Latino teen still learning the Spider-Man ropes.

• The sequel introduces dozens of other Spider-people (and Spider-animals), including Miguel O'Hara, a Mexican character known as Spider-Man 2099.

What they're saying: "Working on a film that has someone with a name like yours or a face like yours is even more satisfying, because as a kid I didn't get to see that," says Fernanda Ortiz Rojo, who does lighting and compositing work (the process combining different visual sources into a single image). Ortiz is from Guadalajara.

• The story of Miles as a Spider-Man who is still finding his way resonated with several of the animators.
• "He's like us migrants who started anew in another country while trying to figure out how to go about everything," Isaac Miranda, who did motion graphics work, says. "It almost makes you feel like you're also a Spider-Man," he adds.
• "It hits different when you can work on something that's this big and includes your roots," says Miralda Medina, who also did compositing.

The characters' diverse backgrounds allowed the animators to play around with subtle references and details that highlight the characters' Mexican and Puerto Rican ancestry.

• Daniel Ceballos, who like Miles is of Puerto Rican descent, says he pitched the idea of having a Puerto Rico flag pop up for a second when Miles' mom snaps at him for getting poor grades in Spanish class.

• "People were really, really open to the idea and thought that it would be interesting," he says. "There was openness to letting this diverse crew inject a little bit of us into [the project]."
• Mexican animator Samuel Rico has said he included an homage to luchadores figurines, a toy of his childhood, in a scene.

The big picture: The number of Latinos working in Hollywood, and especially in animation, is small.

• Ortiz Rojo says it was refreshing to work on a project that included people from different cultures.
• "But that feeling is heightened when there are Latino faces and names," she says.

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