Netflix's New Animation is Actually Great | Apollo 10 ½ : A Space Age Childhood

[Music] when you were a kid did you ever dream of going to the moon did you ever look up at the stars and think of all the possibilities of adventure pondering whether or not you would grow up to be the next neil armstrong or buzz aldrin i remember my mom sewing an astronaut costume together for me when i was a kid i'd run around in that outfit and eat freeze-dried astronaut food bought for me at the local air and space museum when swimming in the pool with my friends we'd dive underwater and pretend that we were floating in space human progress and exploration seemed endless and was fueled to the fire of a child's imagination that's the foundation of richard linklater's latest film apollo 10 and a half a space age childhood the film follows stan a young boy growing up in texas during the space race whose life changes when two government officials approach him on the school yard with a secret mission that mission flying to the moon according to them nasa built their spaceship that they intended to use for a test run a bit too small it's too small for an adult but it's the perfect size for a kid and stan is their only hope but just as soon as link later starts roping us into this childhood fantasy he slams the brakes on the story to instead direct us to the main point of the movie the 60s the film shifts gears and becomes a hybrid of fictional storytelling documentary and video essay that centers around what life was like for a kid in the 60s with jack black narrating during most of the film but i bet you're wondering why is the film using that strange animation style and for that i'm gonna have to take you back to the distant past to the year 2001 we've been on mars since 62. it was may 22nd that's a very important day for you to remember pal link later had found some success in the early 90s with his indie hit slacker and before sunrise as well as his studio teen comedy dazed and confused but by the late 90s his career had started to wane suburbia and the newton boys were flops and link later found it increasingly difficult to find money for his projects at a certain point the hope of another studio-funded movie seemed impossible so he started from scratch self-funding his projects and making them with what he had in this period of his career he made the movies tape and waking life both are great but we're only going to focus on waking life for now this one of a kind film serves as a link later spiritual sequel to slacker but if slacker was kind of an absurd or surreal portrait of austin then waking life is a picture of austin's dreamscape the movie incorporates an animation method known as rotoscoping a practice practically as old as animation itself for reference rotoscoping was used in cinderella to ensure that her movements especially her dances were as realistic and true to life as possible for link later though it served to mask the fact that he was shooting his film on a crappy dv camera he also employed a variety of artists which caused the animation styles in the film to constantly shift the result is that he captured the feeling of walking through dreams in this movie and thus waking life now stands as one of the best surrealist films of american cinema waking life brought critical acclaim back to the austin-based director the often philosophical and commonly bizarre conversations and monologues that comprise the majority of waking life grip the indie and art scenes worldwide and with this movie link later fell in love with the practice of rotoscoping a few years later he would use this technique again in what would end up being one of the best science fiction movies of the 21st century a scanner darkly adapted from the philip k dick novel a scanner darkly which starred keanu reeves winona writer robert downey jr woody harrelson and rory cochrane follows an undercover agent bob archer in a near-future dystopian america a new drug called substance d enslaves a vast portion of the country it's instantly addictive and causes severe brain damage from its use archer leads a double life as both a policeman and a drug dealer in the police station no one knows who anyone is and they wear special suits that constantly change their identities every officer is anonymous to each other going only by fake names like fred arctor lives in a trap house with other addicts intentions rise when the police force assigns him to spy on himself his housemates become suspicious of him and he begins taking more and more substance d to deal with the stress but in turn his perception of reality falls apart because we see the world through his eyes it's hard to tell what is real and what is a hallucination the rotoscoping of a scanner darkly ensured that the hallucinations and the reality blended together seamlessly into one reality there aren't giveaways like bad cgi that clue us into what's true and what's not it also was a probably cheaper way to pull off the bodysuits the cops wear even though it wasn't a commercial hit a scanner darkly was a critical success and it has since gained occult status as it was an indictment on the security state far before snowden blew the whistle on the nsa and the movie was an attack on the war on drugs in the pharmaceutical industry pointing out how the two were probably pretty well connected with each other where did substance d come from why can't we stop it the bigger this war gets the more freedoms we lose the more substance d is on our streets it's a film that's only gotten better with age and after a decade and a half of successful films including bernie before midnight boyhood and everybody wants some blink later has finally returned to the world of rotoscoped animation with apollo 10 and a half a space age childhood but this time around he did it a bit differently if he shot waking life like a documentary and a scanner darkly like a traditional film then apollo 10 and a half was made more like a traditional animation he shot the film at troublemaker studios here in austin texas and utilized their green screens for most of the shots i can tell you as someone who used to work at troublemaker studios that there is a gigantic green screen room considering how often robert rodriguez uses green screens in his movies as he owns the studio this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone he shot the movie against the green screens just so that he could get the actors natural movements but all the sets were made by the animation team for example in the home scenes they only really had chairs in the sofa on the set everything else was animated in post considering astroworld doesn't exist anymore link later in this animation crew used home movies of astroworld that the people of houston sent to them in order to recreate asterworld in the movie to the best of their ability and of course they wrote a scoped archival footage to blend the real footage into the film's world i guess the question i haven't answered yet is why why wrote a scope a slice of life movie wouldn't it work just as well as a live-action film there are a couple equally valid answers link later initially intended to shoot the film live action but since a good chunk of the film is about stan's love of television shows he wanted to play into stan's world and portray the movie as something that felt sort of like an old saturday morning cartoon or at least a hybrid of that kind of cartoon and real life live action would also cement the film as being in reality and the director didn't want that he wanted it to feel more like a mix of reality memory and imagination making it animated helped with achieving this tone that he was shooting for and lastly as expensive as animation is it's cheaper than the cgi and special effects he would have had to pay for if he wanted to film live action moon landings from what i've read though the budget concern was definitely a factor but the desire to capture the story as a blend of memory and fantasy were larger factors in convincing link later to make his latest film a cartoon the end result is a nostalgia-filled film about the late 60s however it's not portraying the time through rose tinted glasses stan talks about the optimism of the era we see him play with his siblings watch old tv shows play baseball with the neighborhood boys in the streets goof off in class swim at the beach and more it's a happy all-american childhood but link later counterbalances the nostalgia with the harsh realities of the time period on a larger scale we see war riots violence racism and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation reminding us that the late 60s were actually an incredibly tumultuous time on a more personal scale stan remembers how his father was a cheapskate how he had a fight with his siblings to watch the shows he liked the fact that oil would cover their skin when they swam in the gulf or how his principal would paddle him when he acted up in class link later gives us the good with the bad the sugar with the medicine and in a way it makes the film more nostalgic and more genuine the darker memories elevate the happier moments and allow us to see a more well-rounded picture of stan's world something interesting to note is that stan feels distant from all the horrors happening worldwide his only connection to them is through the television he consumes the bleak realities of the global community in the same way that he consumes an episode of dark shadows it's both real and unreal to him his only taste of any of it is when he sees a few hippies on the sidewalk in houston it made me think about how things really haven't changed that much the media in the case of this movie tv and in the case of us the internet brings the woes of the world straight into our homes it doesn't mean that we're actually connected to any of these tragic or dark events though in a way it's our own form of entertainment and counting with everything going well and link later plays up the production of the moon landing we often think that it was a simple news broadcast of neil armstrong stepping off the ladder on the moon and delivering his famous line that's one small step for man but the fact is there was a huge buildup to it constant news coverage of the event dominated the airwaves the world watched with baited breath would america beat the ussr in the space race or would the entire project go up in flames walter cronkite provided the commentary on abc and everybody wanted to voice their opinions on the whole matter ranging from people excited about the venture into space to others who preferred the funds the government used to put men on the moon be used instead to feed and house the poor but no matter the differences of opinions america united the moment armstrong stepped onto the moon despite the hardships of the time americans could look to this astounding success and know that maybe a great future was in store for them stan certainly saw himself in the astronauts we know from early in the film that he loves telling tall tales his dad works at nasa as a pencil pusher but stan recounts stories of his dad conducting extremely important missions for the space agency and during show and tell he reports an encounter with a robot a story that no one believes it's safe to assume then that the parts of the film were in stan trains with nasa and flies to the moon it's just stan telling us one of his famous fibs but the parallel action between his moon landing and apollo 11s points to an emotional truth the children actually everyone who witnessed the moon landing back in 1969 realized that humanity could achieve feats once thought impossible to man a desire for greatness awoken the population and this event sent the imaginations of the people flying to the moon and beyond if boyhood was a time capsule of childhood life in the odds then apollo 10 and a half is a time capsule of childhood life in the 60s it's interesting how linklater seems to love capturing and preserving the mundane suburban american culture well mundane in theory really but it's so obvious that he loves every aspect of it that we can't help but feel that love when watching his films we might look to the stars for inspiration and hope but we must also remember to cherish our lives here on planet earth so [Music]

Channel: The Kino Corner

Views: 34,257

Keywords: netflix, animation, cartoon, richard, linklater, space age childhood, apollo, 10 1/2, waking life, slacker, austin, texas, rodriguez, robert, troublemaker, moviemaking, filmmaking, cinema, art, the kino corner, kino, 60s, space, nasa, armstrong, 1969, historical, history, video essay, jack black, moon, keanu reeves, indie, independent, 90s, tv, television, dark shadows, news, internet, media, buzz aldrin, flight, planes, animated

Id: mW7YmGErv4I

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022