After quite a mid-aughts with Before Midnight, Boyhood, and Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater has continued at near the same clip, despite less of an embrace from the audience after Last Flag Flying and Where’d You Go, Bernadette came and went. He’s now back with his next feature, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, which arrives on Netflix on April 1 following a premiere at SXSW.
Following the story of the first moon landing seen through the eyes of a kid growing up in the 1960s in Houston, TX, the film features a mix of hand-drawn and computer-animated imagery, along with voice work by Milo Coy, Lee Eddy, Bill Wise, Natalie L’Amoreaux, Josh Wiggins, Sam Chipman, Jessica Brynn Cohen, Danielle Guilbot with Zachary Levi and Glen Powell and Jack Black.
“After the years of work on Apollo 10 1/2, 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,” said Linklater. “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.”
See the trailer below.
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood premieres at SXSW and arrives on Netflix on April 1.