Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022) is set in Houston in the summer of 1969. It has two layers: a boy secretly sent to the Moon by NASA, and the same boy's suburban life. The second layer is the actual subject; school, television, siblings, the yard, the mall, and the landing everyone watched at the same moment that summer. Richard Linklater drew on his own childhood; he grew up in Houston in the same neighbourhoods as the children of NASA employees. It was made with rotoscope animation, which he had used before on Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. The live action was shot first and drawn over afterwards, at Robert Rodriguez's Troublemaker Studios on the largest green screen in Texas. The Academy initially ruled it ineligible in the animated feature category, and reversed that after an appeal supported by other directors. Jack Black narrates as the adult Stanley, with Glen Powell and Zachary Levi in the cast. It premiered at SXSW on 13 March 2022, opened in cinemas on 24 March and reached Netflix on 1 April. It runs 99 minutes. Good for: sixties America, memories of childhood, and rotoscope animation. Less good for: there is almost no plot and much of the film is recollection delivered as a list. The Moon mission never fully fuses with the rest. The political upheaval of the period passes only in the background of a television.