Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood—Richard Linklater Enters the Nostalgia Zone

By Jennie Punter

Rating: A

For Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood, his third animated film, Austin-based filmmaker Richard Linklater mines the events and cultural ephemera of his Houston-adjacent youth, creating a Kodachrome-hued shaggy-dog tale that unfolds during the halcyon days of 1969 leading up to NASA’s historic Apollo 11 moon mission.

 Almost two decades ago, while excavating his own psyche for ideas to spark the narrative of his epic, Oscar-nominated film Boyhood (2014), Linklater realized he was probably the only filmmaker who not only remembered the excitement of that time but also lived close to NASA. 

 Linklater also remembered a particular “what if” kid fantasy that provided the lift-off for Apollo 10 ½’s eventual structure. 

NASA puts a Stan on the moon in Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Childhood

Ten-year-old Stan (Milo Coy) is in the middle of a regular school day of sports and corporal punishment when he is unexpectedly asked to meet with two NASA scientists. 

The white-shirted men calmly inform him that he has been recruited to fly a secret advance test mission to the moon using a lunar module they accidentally built “a little too small.” He can't tell anyone, not even his parents. The NASA guys have even come up with a clever cover story for his absence. 

 Soon, we see Stan spinning around in one of those massive centrifuge machines. But in the middle of a voluminous vomit, the frame freezes. 

 “OK, pause,” says the slightly uncomfortable older Stan (Jack Black) in voiceover. “We’ll come back to this part later.” Make that quite a bit later. “Let me tell you about life back then,” he continues. 

 Barely five minutes into the film, we’re pulled away from the story we think we’re going to see into, well, a Richard Linklater film. 

In his beloved Dazed and Confused (1993) and the Before Trilogy romance films, for example, life’s surface textures and deep questions are explored as the characters walk (or drive) and talk. In Apollo 10 ½, which is animated and thus is tightly designed and handmade, that loose, intuitive structure comes from Jack Black’s narration as older Stan, the overall effect of which is a little like that of Rex Allen, aka the Arizona Cowboy, who narrated many Disney nature and Western productions that were regularly shown on TV’s Wonderful World of Disney. 

While the issues of the day -- racism, poverty, pollution, women's rights -- do appear inside the story frame, older Stan wants us experience that time and place through the perspective of his younger self.   

 Linklater and head of animation Tommy Pallotta eschewed the proprietary Rotoscope animation process they used for Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), using more traditional 2D techniques, and drawing inspiration from the look and texture of comic books, baseball cards, board games, product logos, film and TV titles, and Saturday morning cartoons and integrating them into the storytelling as well.  

 “We also invited our animators to leave their fingerprints on the film and celebrate the collective creativity of our artists and feel their impressions all over the film,” Linklater writes in his director’s note.  Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is definitely Linklater's most granular film, rich in the small details and moments of daily life that unite to power the biggest stories of our times.

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is written, directed, and produced by Richard Linklater. Tommy Pallotta is head of animation. Starring Milo Coy, Lee Eddy, Bill Wise Natalie L’Amoreaux, and Josh Wiggings. Narrated by Jack Black. The film opens in select Canadian theatres on March 25, 2022, and premieres globally on Netflix on April 1, 2022.