“There aren’t many animated movies that are period films,” says Apollo 10½ director Richard Linklater. “I really wanted it to have this cinematic period vibe, like the film stock of the time or the look of images from that era.”
The director transports audiences back to the fateful summer of 1969 in Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood. Apollo 10½ is part period piece and part fantasy as it plays with aspects of Linklater’s childhood growing up in Houston, Texas as the world eagerly prepared itself for Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon. However, as the title implies with a Fellini-esque touch of fantasy, another story happened between Apollo 10 and Apollo 11. It turns out that the folks at NASA flubbed their calculations for the spaceship and it could hold only a young boy. When two suits appear on the playground, Stan (Milo Coy) becomes the first man—nay, boy—to set foot on the moon.
Apollo 10½ conjures Stan’s imaginative identification with the Apollo 11 mission by running him through the gauntlet of training exercises. In between gravitational upchucks and underwater perils, Stan relishes the happy days of the ’60s. Where docs like Apollo 11 immerse audiences in archives to recreate the past, Linklater creates the you-had-to-be-there experience through the retro animation.
Scrapbook Aesthetics
The film makes Linklater’s third animated feature after Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). However, Linklater sees Apollo 10½ as a much different work than his previous animated dramas. “This movie was completed completely in animation,” observes Linklater. “Every aspect of the movie was hand drawn outside of the characters themselves. We’re dropping them into completely animated environments, whereas with Scanner and Waking Life, everything that we shot live action, we were animating. It’s very different. It’s built completely differently for good reason. We’re creating a world that doesn’t exist anymore: Houston in the late ’60s. And there’s the Moon—these aren’t images that are right in front of us.”
Whereas Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly used rotoscoping to animate live action footage, Linklater says Apollo 10½ drew upon a collage of techniques. Performance capture technology recorded live action movements with actors before greenscreens, but the backgrounds were exclusively animated. Linklater adds that some rotoscope work traced the outlines of the characters, while a mix of 2D and 3D animation brought Apollo 10½ to life. “It was fun to mash up these various techniques,” admits Linklater. “That contributed to this scrapbook, multi-textured feel that we were going for in the look of the movie.”
Back with Black
While the adventure of going to the Moon is the premise of the story, but Apollo 10½ is really a look back at boyhood in a specific era. After the NASA recruiters tap Stan for blast-off, his adult self reminiscences about his days growing up in Texas in the ’60s for a fully fleshed-out first act in what’s essentially a two-act film. Even though half the movie sets the tone, the look back isn’t a digression. Rather, the film gives a very specific sense of the details of suburban America in a time of change. Sure, people were going to the Moon, but Stan’s dad could happily drink while driving and kids suffered through expertly rationed meals of spam and other bad food.
The return to the summer of ’69 also lets Linklater reunite with his frequent collaborator Jack Black. The comic narrates Apollo 10½ as the adult Stan, which marks the first time that he and Linklater have worked together since 2011’s Bernie. “Jack’s mom actually worked at NASA,” explains Linklater. “I knew this and it meant a lot to him. We’re always looking for an excuse to work together, but I thought he would bring the funny and the irony to his voice.”
Spam and the ’60s
The nostalgic lens evokes Saturday morning cartoons as the television set filters the look back. It was, after all, the moment when many families bought TVs to watch the Moon landing. “The movie’s a pretty specific record of the specificity of the culture at the time—TV shows and memories that a kid of that era and place might be spending their time doing. It’s also a lot of family dynamics within this large family,” notes Linklater. “To me, it’s like a memory film, but also a cultural memory film: what was on TV, what shows, what songs. It’s a trip. It’s trying to capture a place in time.”
Linklater says that devoting so much time to the specifics of Houston in the ’60s was essential to create the sense of realism that would contrast with Stan’s lunar expedition. “I thought if I could pull the viewer into that moment, they would more likely buy the fantastical element of the movie that runs parallel,” says the director. “That was the narrative trick, to have it be equal in your head even though one’s more factually specific and one couldn’t be more out there. I wanted them to mesh creatively in the imaginative part your brain.”
Looking Back at the Present
The director, who has looked to the past in films like the 1980s-set comedy Everybody Wants Some!! and the Citizen Kane yarn Me and Orson Welles, but also been very conscientious of time in works like Boyhood and the Before trilogy, sees much to learn by looking back. “A Life magazine from 1939 will tell you so much. It will put you in the moment. I’m always going for the approach of dropping a camera into life back then to show that life felt like,” says Linklater.
“We have that in our own lives as far as our relations to our younger selves as we get older—that gets even more interesting and complex. Culture has its own cultural resonance,” observes Linklater. “On most fronts, we’re better off today, but not everything has to change. You could grab some greatest hits and incorporate that into your parenting or cultural life. Not all should be lost. You’re making your own decisions as an individual, and as a culture, of what to discard and what to hang onto.”
