The new superman by James Gunn is a redesign full of style, sunlight, and legacy

Every new superhero adaptation starts with the comics. Each time, it’s necessary to choose a storyline, but above all a visual approach—drawing from the vast archive of narratives, drawings, and alternate versions. James Gunn’s Superman has a crystal-clear visual reference: All Star Superman, the 2005 limited series written by Grant Morrison, illustrated by Frank Quitely, and colored by Jamie Grant.

The film mirrors its clear skies and its obsession with sunlight, which shines in every action scene—always warm and bright. This stems from Superman’s mythology (he draws his powers from the yellow sun of our galaxy), and from the film’s plot, which aims from the very start to explain the sun’s centrality in defining what Superman is. But it’s also a tonal choice.

With this film, Superman is flipped compared to everything that came before, starting with his look. A new costume, slightly softer and less skin-tight, a redesigned Metropolis, and a much sunnier tone—in the dialogue, in the story, and just as much in the images. Everything looks more colorful, and everything sounds more colorful. James Gunn, who wrote and directed the film, applies his signature humor and irreverence to the most conformist character of all. To balance this, however, a classic reference was needed—something traditional. And as often happens, they found it in the Superman of the Fleischer brothers.

Max and Dave Fleischer were two brothers who, in 1921, founded an animation studio. For twenty years they were Walt Disney’s biggest rivals, producing cartoons like Popeye and Betty Boop. In 1941, they created a series of Superman animated shorts for theaters, with what was then an enormous budget ($50,000). Those shorts are still considered a gold standard in animation and remain one of the best renditions of the character ever made. Heavily influenced by Art Deco and partly produced using rotoscoping (filming live actors and tracing over the footage), these cartoons changed the character forever.

Before the Fleischer shorts, Superman didn’t fly—his power was the ability to leap so far it looked like flying. That was tricky to animate with the technical precision the Fleischers wanted, and since animating flight was easier, they gave him that ability. From that moment on, in comics and elsewhere, Superman has always flown. In James Gunn’s new film, the red trunks worn on the outside, the slightly higher S on the chest, and several other details directly evoke the Fleischer version—not only because it canonized a look that would be imitated for decades, but because it was the first to define the idea of Superman’s strength. The goal of those cartoons was to amaze the audience and make the effort behind Superman’s incredible feats tangible. Even today, the weight they give to objects—and thus the sense of Superman’s strength—remains unmatched.

This Superman starts from that same principle. Whereas previous films portrayed him almost like a god, capable of superhuman feats with little effort (except when facing his equals), this new incarnation often shows him wounded, struggling, crushed under burdens he can barely hold—on the verge of failure. Gunn uses several techniques to make this difficulty visible, all of them rooted in design, crafted through visual effects—which are, in essence, a photorealistic form of animation. One such technique is simulating a wide-angle lens, slightly distorting, like those used on race cars or fighter jets, in aerial flight scenes. Another is how close-up shots capture the brawls with giant monsters. These changes are necessary at a time when superhero films are trying to shift away from their core millennial audience—those born in the ’80s and ’90s—toward the next generation. Hence the need for a new tone. Out with darkness and god-like heroes; in with serenity, positivity, and a completely different kind of optimism—though the big political themes remain (there’s a whole subplot about war and global interests). In all of this, design is the fundamental weapon used to communicate, from the very first image and the first trailer, that this is something new.

One of the first official images showed the new Superman, in an apartment, putting on his boots like any ordinary guy, while giant monsters loom outside the window—as if he hasn’t noticed. It’s an ironic image that portrays Superman as just a regular man. One of the most recent ones, now that the film is about to be released, shows Superman sitting with Krypto the Superdog, looking at Earth from space, as if they were in a park on a sunny hill. These are images far removed from the solemn, grandiose visuals that usually accompany Superman’s movie promotion. And although the story deals with responsibility, these images—and more broadly the film’s sunlit design—point in the opposite direction.

If the story confirms everything we know about the character—his mission to save humanity, the burden of doing good for all, the need to always be the best version of himself—the design moves in the opposite direction: toward relief, optimism, and lightness. And in cinema, design is so powerful that between the two, it’s the latter that wins. Superman is a much lighter film than any previous adaptation—including the iconic 1978 version with Christopher Reeve—because it’s designed and written to convey the same lightness James Gunn brings to all his stories.