The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story, a short film by Sony Pictures Animation, was shown for the first time at the Annecy International Film Festival. The movie explores mental health by showing the Marvel Comics character Miles Morales/Spider-Man dealing with an anxiety problem.

Miles’s anxiety attack is shown by the appearance of a dark alter ego and a made-up spider invasion in his bedroom. As Miles turns to his father, Jefferson Morales, for comfort, the short shows how important strong father-son ties are.

The Spider Within is a spinoff of the popular movies Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the upcoming Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which have already made $225.5 million at the box office.

This short film was made through a program called “Leading and Empowering New Storytellers” (LENS), which was run by Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks together.

The people who worked on the movie, like director Jarelle Dampier and writer Khalla Amazan, got ideas from their own lives, like when Dampier had an anxiety attack when he was offered the job of directing the project.

The goal of The Spider Within was to start healing talks about anxiety and trauma in a world after a pandemic.

During the talk at the Annecy festival, Dampier mentioned an interesting Easter egg that had to do with the nuclear spider from Earth-42 that gave Miles his superpowers.