Apollo 10½

You wouldn’t expect the Moon Landing to provide us with another film, another fictional take on a pivotal point in scientific discovery. But Richard Linklater, who specialises in nostalgic portraits such as Boy—has created an animated/rotoscoped story about a boy who lives in Suburban Texas. His father works for NASA but the boy bemoans that Dad isn’t in a “cool” role like for instance an Astronaut.

The film is a beautiful evocation of an event from the perspective of a child. Stan lives with his brothers and sisters, and his life is a mixture of school and playing: doing all the childhood things: enjoying the relative freedom with games, and of course getting into trouble and suffering the consequences. Jack Black provides the voice-over as adult Stan tells the story of life as the Apollo mission launches and the astronauts walk on the moon.

The title refers to the bizarre conceit of the film which is that NASA have accidentally made a Lunar Lander at the wrong scale and they need a boy to fly a secret mission to test it. This is a subplot in even further flashback as Stan undergoes Astronaut training and flies a mission to the Moon in complete secrecy. This may seem a little off-the-wall and suggest something like InnerSpace or Flight of The Navigator but the conceit just gets us into the training sequence and the flight control room without taking the story away from the life of this kid and his family and friends. Really as the Landing approaches as the Vietnam war rages, this is a celebration of living through events and enjoying them from a child’s perspective—and not being terribly worried about the bad stuff. The storytelling is incredible as we learn quite a lot about Stan’s parents from the child’s perspective instead of a critical narrative judgement of people whose flaws aren’t apparent to their kids, but the protective arm is always there.

And the evocation of the period is beautiful—think of The Wonder Years because it’s that good. There is something bewildering about the sixties, and something exciting about the idea of having seen The Beatles and other bands coming up, and this is a depiction of that excitement. The suburbs contrasts with the trips to the beach, and when they go to the cinema or watch TV the scenes are lovingly recreated as animation. And so too is the Moon Landing itself. Maybe the kids were more interested in a day trip to the Astro World theme park than the seemingly endless build up to the landing, but the family still came together to watch it—and by then you know their individual perspectives on what’s going on. The film is such a wonderful evocation of childhood and that’s what makes it such a joyful experience.