Apollo 10 1/2: Les fusées de mon enfance

Stanley (Jack Black as adult and Milo Coy as child) comes of age in late 60s Houston, Texas against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing where the nostalgic reality mixes with childhood fantasy of being the first boy on the moon on a secret NASA mission for Apollo 10 ½.

Apollo 10 ½ is the latest film from Richard Linklater. Linklater had the idea back in 2004, inspired by his childhood growing up in 60s Houston with development taking shape in 2018. Originally intended to be a live-action film, when the project was set up at Netflix, Linklater instead decided to do the film as an animated project similar to his films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly due to the "playful" nature of animation. Linklater has created a nostalgic but true to life picture of growing up in the 1960s during the emergence of the space age.

Jack Black narrates the thoughts of our protagonist Stanley, and Black's delivery is pitch perfect in describing 60s Houston and the various contemporary trends, pop culture, and political and social events as witnessed by Stanley as a child. We get a sense of growing up during a particular time and place but as distorted from the nostalgic view of someone who was a child during those events. References are made to political and social strife of the time and the way in which it's relayed plays to true to how children experience those kinds of events. Even the landing of Apollo 11 covered in the film discusses the little seen outcry from those claiming it was a waste of money and resources that could've been applied elsewhere using archival footage interspersed with the narrative footage to give a glimpse into contemporary mindsets of the time. The animation is really solid per the standards set by Linklater's other films of this type and I think Linklater uses it effectively to evoke feelings of nostalgia mixed with the childish space fantasy that many kids fascinated with space travel have conjured themselves at one point or another. Along with the larger events we also get insight into familial and social dynamics of the era with fond reminiscence of the neighborhood pyromaniacs, the endless cycle of at least one kid having a cast, or various other mischief and shenanigans of the day.

Linklater has created a capture of the space race and the surrounding era in which it occurred through an honest but nostalgic lens. Jack Black's narration is sincere and credible and the capture of smaller childhood distractions intermixed with larger scale events in the background gives us the feeling of being there that only the best storytellers can give.

I didn't grow up in 1960s Houston. I grew up in 1980s Newcastle Upon Tyne. So a rather different environment.

However, I was still taken in by the more nostalgic theme. I don't know why but for some reason its fun to relate events in a movie to your own youth.

Like falling asleep in the back of the car and waking up in my bed, making prank calls (at least until '1471' was brought to our attention), comically sadistic teachers, brutal but awesome playground games, being blissfully unaware of any environmental hazard (breathing in smoke from a gigantic bonfire all day in your mate's garden) , daft TV programs, playing 40-a-side football in the street, my Nana visiting with her 'views', obscure board games, 6 hour games of monopoly, disappointing packed lunches...and so on.

There is in fact not much of a story to this movie, just an opportunity to forget the worries of the present and remember that you had a youth, stuff happened, and you survived. The 'kid going to the moon' was very much a side story.

Fun animation depicting a time when most all people were experiencing the same look at a real time event in our early stages of technology. For better or worse, everyone was viewing from a shared lense. Quite a contrast from our splintered viewing from which we now interpret real time reality. The director has nailed the zeitgeist of 1969.

I grew up in Houston from mid '50s to mid '70s and the nostalgic details in Linklater's great new animated feature was almost overwhelming. I'm sure many people will appreciate it, especially the visual style, but for us Space City kids, it is a real treasure trove of memories. Only one goof: the Majestic Theater did not look like that and was quite the opposite of the run-down theater he described. It was a magnificent movie palace in the heart of downtown.

The title and trailer is definitely misleading by insinuating that this is some sort of space adventure. Granted, there are some fragments of space adventuring going on, but 95% of the film is basically a time capsule of the 60s which tells you all about what life was back then, filled to the brim with nostalgia.

As such it reminded me a bit of The Virgin Suicides in the romantic way it glorifies those long lost days, so stuffed with timely music, tv-shows and other pop-cultural tidbits that it successfully weaves a rose tinted memory of childhood, which will probably have most people create nostalgic connections to what all these references mean in their own life.