Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022) is a Netflix animated film from Richard Linklater — watch it online on iFILM. Jack Black narrates as an adult looking back at summer 1969 in Houston, Texas, where ten-year-old Stan grows up in a neighborhood full of NASA employees. The moon landing isn't a distant event on a TV screen; it's practically the local news.

Linklater shoots live action and then draws over it — the rotoscope technique he first used in Waking Life — giving the whole film the soft, slightly unreal quality of a half-remembered afternoon. Woven into the nostalgia is a playful fiction: Stan is secretly recruited by two NASA men (Zachary Levi and Glen Powell) to pilot a capsule to the moon before Apollo 11 launches. The line between what happened and what a kid wished had happened is the point.

It lands somewhere between a love letter to Baby Boomer childhood and a meditation on how history feels from the ground level when you're ten years old and distracted by Saturday cartoons. Stream Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022) online on iFILM.