Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Adventure has splashed down at Netflix. Although Linklater’s latest film is a combination of hand-drawn animation, live-action, and CGI, it’s being referred to as an animated project.
Filming of the live-action portion wrapped up in March 2020 in Austin, Texas, pre-Covid-19 restrictions. Work on the hand-drawn and computer-animated portions is going on at Minnow Mountain in Austin and Submarine in the Netherlands.
Richard Linklater wrote and directed the sci-fi film, with Tommy Pallotta, Mike Blizzard, Femke Wolting, and Bruno Felix producing. Apollo 10 1/2 is a production of Linklater’s Detour FilmProductions and Submarine.
The cast includes Jack Black, Zachary Levi, Glen Powell, Josh Wiggins, Milo Coy, Lee Eddy, and Bill Wise. Natalie L’Amoreaux, Jessica Brynn Cohen, Sam Chipman, and Danielle Guilbot also star in Apollo 10 1/2.
“It struck me years ago that this was my film to make, from both a chronological and proximity level – I was there, going into 3rd grade. Our unique animation style allows both the conjuring of a world long gone, and the flowing, playful expression of memory and imagination. It’s been a fun, creative journey to incorporate things like 3D graphics into a live-action shoot to help bring this story to life,” said Richard Linklater.
The Plot, Courtesy of Netflix:
Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Adventure tells the story of the first moon landing in the summer of 1969 from two interwoven perspectives. It both captures the astronaut and mission control view of the triumphant moment, and the lesser-seen bottom up perspective of what it was like from an excited kid’s perspective, living near NASA but mostly watching it on TV like hundreds of millions of others.
It’s ultimately both an exacting re-creation of this special moment in history and a kid’s fantasy about being plucked from his average life in suburbia to secretly train for a covert mission to the moon.
