“A memory… a fantasy… the memory of a fantasy, melded into a re-creation of a time and place. That’s one way I’d describe Apollo 10 ½,” writes acclaimed director Richard Linklater in his director’s note for the Netflix animated movie, published today alongside a brand-new trailer. “It seems fitting that, like the moon landing itself, it rolled around in the imaginative realm for many years before it became a reality.”
The trailer for Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood introduces us to Stan — a typical kid growing up in 1960s Houston who becomes the space program’s only hope when it turns out the lunar landing module has been built too small for adult astronauts to fit in. Taking inspiration from Boyhood and A Scanner Darkly filmmaker Linklater’s own life, the feature is described as part coming of age, part societal commentary and part out-of-this-world adventure.
Written, directed and produced by Linklater, Apollo 10 ½ is produced by Mike Blizzard, Tommy Pallotta and Submarine animation studio founders Femke Wolting and Bruno Felix; John Sloss is executive producer. The cast features Milo Coy, Lee Eddy, Bill Wise, Natalie L’Amoreaux, Josh Wiggins, Sam Chipman, Jessica Brynn Cohen and Danielle Guilbot, with Zachary Levi and Glenn Powell and Jack Black.
Apollo 10 ½ premieres on Netflix on April 1. Read more about the making of the movie in the April ’22 issue of Animation Magazine, available now. Linklater’s Director’s Note continues:
“Eighteen years ago, I was pulling out memories of 2nd grade to help me construct the narrative of Boyhood‘s second year. Even though that movie is a celebration of the non-extraordinary, it became clear to me I had lived through and close to something truly extraordinary — the grandest and most enduring engineering feat in human history. I think it took decades for us to fully process that the Apollo program and walking on the Moon was the apex because we’d all believed it was just a great beginning.
My ‘who but me?’ thinking kicked in when I realized I was probably the only filmmaker that remembered how exciting it was to be a kid at that moment and was geographically that close to NASA. When I remembered an actual kid fantasy I had at the time, I stumbled upon my way to tell the story from both the astronaut perspective and from the bottom-up, public, TV-consumer perspective. There were three astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission and 600 million people watching its coverage. I’d seen many representations of space missions, but didn’t remember any stories of just how once-in-a-lifetime unique it was to be simply taking it in. And knowing it was an event that would forever be noted in human history seemed to warrant that perspective as well. A thousand years from now, when wars and world leaders that seemed so significant to their times are blurred together, this brief era when we initiated space travel and first went to the Moon will always register as one of the giant steps for humankind.
I think so much of a film is determined in the gestation time long before filming. What it is, what it isn’t, how it should look and feel, dialing in the exact right tone… all that happens in the movie you’re forever making in your head before you pick up a camera. Somewhere along the way, in the visualization of Apollo 10 ½, I realized the story wasn’t working as live action. It was confusing, and it was maybe too literal. It just didn’t feel quite right. As had happened to me a couple of times over the years, it all clicked once I started thinking of it as an animated movie. The fantasy and reality would commingle much more happily in the brain, where everything is a construct, and where the processing of memory has permanent residence near dreams and imagination.
I also knew it couldn’t look like my two previous animated films. The interpolated rotoscoping technique we had pushed to its limits all those years ago wouldn’t work in a story where everything had to be designed and created. Apollo would be best realized in a more traditional 2D world. To achieve all the necessary textures (vintage period, comic book, newsreel documentary, grandiose fantasy, realistic character piece), it would require a playful combination of various techniques such as 3D and some minimal performance capture within the character animation. The visual goal was a very handmade scrapbook feel. While it was always the longer, more time-consuming answer to every problem, the handmade choice was always the right one.
The look of the film was primarily inspired by the time that the story takes place. The challenge was to take an entirely digital process and imbue it with the analog influence of that era. The beautiful look of Kodachrome film is where we started. We decided to animate on twos to give it a retro feel and chose handmade animation over digital effects. We thought of new ways to show the different textures and designs to mirror the analog world and subjective and creative memory of Stan. Classic animated films of the past and Saturday morning cartoons of the ’60s were a big inspiration as well. We also invited our animators to leave their fingerprints on the film and celebrate the collective creativity of our artists and feel their impressions all over the film.
After the years of work on Apollo 10 ½ , I think everyone involved is excited to take folks on these intermingled journeys — one a young astronaut’s trip to the Moon, and another that runs hand-in-hand with him and his family in the suburbs near NASA. I wanted it to be many things at once: a re-creation, a fantasy, and a memoir of ephemera, and making a large portion of the film during these dark and unsettling last two years only sharpened our focus as to what were primarily trying to share in this story, namely the hope, optimism, communal spirit and creativity of that time.”
