Directed by Jarelle Dampier — Screenplay by Khaila Amazan.
Sony Pictures Entertainment has today released Jarelle Dampier’s animated short film The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story on YouTube (click here to watch it). The animated short film, which originally premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June of 2023, is a part of Sony’s animated Spider-Verse trilogy, and it is set between the events of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse from 2018 and last year’s sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. In the animated short, we follow Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) as he returns home after a stressful day of crime-fighting and being a teenager and is approached by his father Jefferson Davis (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry), who wants to have a father-son night where they watch horror films on the TV and snack on popcorn. Miles, however, is unprepared for this, and he hides away in his room where all his fears manifest in the form of first a shadow and, later, spiders.
Further Information about the Short and its Partnership with the Kevin Love Fund:
For the release of the animated short film, Sony Pictures Entertainment has partnered with the Kevin Love Fund (i.e. the mental health awareness fund established by former professional basketball player Kevin Love), which you can read more about and consider donating to by clicking here. The animated short film has also been incorporated into an ‘education initiative’ or ‘lesson plan’ titled ‘The Hero Within,’ which you can read more about here.
My Thoughts On, and Initial Reaction to, the Animated Short Film:
Try to avoid suppressing your innermost feelings, worries, stresses, and anxieties. It’s not healthy to bottle things up. There are people in your life, who are willing to listen and who can understand, even if they’ve not been in your exact situation. Emotional openness is not a weakness, it is a strength, and we should do our utmost to promote the kind of openness that is so important to our well-being, as it is not only healthy but often of paramount importance to our ability to carry on being who we are and like to be.
This is a rather effective short about the horror of letting your innermost feelings and frustrations overwhelm and tear you apart. Animation is always super effective when it comes to visualizing the feeling of being your worst enemy, fighting yourself, and not being capable of expressing what aspect of your life is causing you stress. I enjoyed the horror angle to this (its use of red is especially powerful), and the way it uses spiders to creep Miles (and you) out is well done, as is the father-son connection and how Miles is initially unprepared to open up to him for reasons that you can easily think up. This is a very effective (and, obviously, extraordinarily well-animated) animated short film that emphasizes the universality of mental health struggle even in superpowered individuals.
Furthermore, as someone particularly interested in education and mental health awareness, it makes me so glad to see the partnership, which I only learned about after having initially posted my initial reaction (as seen above) to Letterboxd. I think using this short film — essentially an off-shoot from two of the most popular animated films of the last ten years — as a gateway to get young people to open up about their understanding of mental health and emotional openness is really smart, and I think it could be really effective.
– Review / Article Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
I'm Jeffrey Rex 
Great reviews as always. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of this one because I was a huge fan of the “Spider-Verse” films. I absolutely adored “Across the Spider-Verse”, which was one of my favorite movies of 2023. I really liked the depiction of mental health in both the films. As someone that has often struggled with mental health issues, I appreciate it when movies take time to address these issues directly. So, I will definitely keep this one on my watchlist. Here’s why I adored “ASV”:
Thank you for the nice comment 🙂