Richard Linklater’s Next Movie Is An Animated Space Adventure For Netflix
It’s been 14 years since Richard Linklater’s last animated feature, the rotoscoped sci-fi film A Scanner Darkly. Before that, he also made Waking Life, a fascinating rotoscoped movie about the world of dreams. Since the, Linklater’s made films like Boyhood, Bernie, and Before Midnight, all in live-action. Now he’s returning to the rotoscoping technique — drawing over live-action footage — that served him so well in the past.
Via press release, Netflix announced they are partnering with Linklater for an animated space film called Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure, which retells the story of the famous Apollo 11 moon landing both from the perspective of the astronauts, and that of a child watching the action unfold on television. Linklater says rotoscoping allows for “both the conjuring of a world long gone, and the flowing, playful expression of memory and imagination,” noting that he was personally about to enter 3rd grade in the summer of 1969.
The production has already wrapped its live-action shoot back in March of this year, which means once animation is completed — something that can be done even during a global pandemic — the movie should be able to be released some time in the near future. Here’s the film’s full synopsis:
Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Adventure tells the story of the first moon landing in the summer of 1969 from two interwoven perspectives. It both captures the astronaut and mission control view of the triumphant moment, and the lesser-seen bottom up perspective of what it was like from an excited kid’s perspective, living near NASA but mostly watching it on TV like hundreds of millions of others. It’s ultimately both an exacting re-creation of this special moment in history and a kid’s fantasy about being plucked from his average life in suburbia to secretly train for a covert mission to the moon.
Linklater plus rotoscoping plus a look at childhood, imagination, and exploration sounds ... like a must-see movie? Whenever Apollo 10 1/2 shows up on Netflix, I will definitely be ready to watch it.
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