Richard Linklater is looking back from outer space at childhood’s blue remembered hills in this intensely enjoyable and sweet family movie for Netflix. It’s a rotoscope animation digitally based on live action; in its way, it is every bit as cultish and hallucinatory as the ones that Linklater has made before, like Waking Life from 2001 and A Scanner Darkly from 2006.
A 10-year-old boy called Stan (voiced by Milo Coy and then by Jack Black as Stan’s adult self, narrating the action) is growing up in a Houston suburb in the late 60s in a big family with a dad employed in a lowly admin job at Nasa. Stan is obsessed (like everyone) with the Apollo 11 moon mission, and has a vivid fantasy or hallucination that he has been picked by Nasa agents to be a test astronaut for a top-secret dummy-run moon landing, codenamed Apollo 10½, for which the authorities accidentally built the lunar test module too small. So they need a kid of the highest calibre to pilot the thing down to the moon’s surface and bring it back home safely to reassure Neil, Buzz and Michael that they’ll be OK.
