By Richard Brody
Genre is mostly a matter of marketing, but great filmmakers nonetheless use its labels to toy daringly with expectations, as Richard Linklater does in his new film, “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood,” which comes to Netflix this Friday. The movie is an animated autobiographical fantasy, set in a suburb of Houston in 1969, that follows a fourth grader named Stan (voiced by Milo Coy) who is recruited by nasa for a secret trip to the moon just ahead of the historic Apollo 11 mission. From the start, all three of the film’s genres intertwine. It’s built expressly as a memory piece, narrated by the adult Stan (voiced by Jack Black), who details the day he was summoned to action, during a school-recess game of kickball. That game comes to life with a meticulous vividness—Stan unfolds strategies, sketches personalities, highlights the cruelties of school discipline—in a way that turns the telescope of time into a microscope and brings childhood back with a fanatical profusion of remembered detail.
What’s more, the animation both borrows from and radically revises Linklater’s own personal history with the form. “Apollo 10 1/2” is mostly rotoscoped, its drawings (or computer graphics) built atop live-action video, as in “Waking Life,” from 2001. But, where the earlier film features a loose and wavy style of animation to blur the hard edges of live-action filming and create surreal distortions of the action, “Apollo 10 1/2” uses animation to reproduce and exaggerate the sharp edges and fixed contours of video capture, while swapping out the subtleties of shading for uniform fields of bright color. The visual effect is a sort of glaring, uncanny hyperrealism, as the adult Stan’s intricate reminiscences are both illustrated and amplified by the images, which don’t so much seem to illustrate what he’s saying as to embody the memories, from within, that he’s describing—even to bring them back to life. And, if those memories have congealed in Stan’s mind as a sort of lived-in movie, it’s no accident: the very development of his mental life in terms of pop culture is the prime subject of “Apollo 10 1/2,” and Linklater unfolds it playfully, exuberantly, earnestly, with a sense of style and speed to reflect his own excitement on contact with it.
No sooner does young Stan get going in the nasa space-training program than the adult Stan makes a break in the action, freezing the frame to set the stage of his childhood. What follows is a cinematic parenthetical, an elaborate and essay-like set of flashbacks that run for about half of the film and utterly dominate it, emotionally and thematically. Stan makes a dash through the primal public history of his own early childhood in the nineteen-sixties, pre-memory, to give the context for the Apollo moon-landing program, the establishment of nasa in Houston, the growth of the city’s suburbs, and the outer-space centricity of life there, complete with a vision of the Astrodome and a word about its Astro-Turf, with reference to the great New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath. (Cleverly, Linklater presents Stan’s background knowledge in a different style of animation.) Stan’s father (voiced by Bill Wise) is in charge of shipping and receiving at nasa, his mother (Lee Eddy) is a graduate student, and he has five older siblings—three sisters and two brothers. (This TV-like family is an element of fantasy, too: Linklater’s parents divorced when he was a child, a story that he unfolds in “Boyhood.”)
Stan (which is to say, Linklater) seems to remember it all: the bad drainage in the rapidly built housing development, the pinball-cheating strategies of the “hoodlums” at the bowling alley, the foibles of his parents and grandparents and neighbors. He crams his memories onto the soundtrack and the screen with an urgency that reflects both love and loss, as well as a sense of wonder that extends into multiple dimensions—both the sheer miracle of consciousness itself and the joys and fears of growing up at the time in question. He remembers pop culture as inseparable from family relationships; it provides a core of common experience. In effect, “Apollo 10 1/2” is a work of personalized sociology regarding a sliver of experience that is nonetheless exemplary—a sliver that, under the microscope of the memory fanatic, expands thrillingly, reveals itself to be a world in itself and a cinematic synecdoche for the world at large. The very prominence of the space program in Houston—where, as Stan says, most of the adults he knew had some connection with nasa—highlights, as he says, the boundless confidence in science and technology that promised a brighter, sci-fi-like future. Yet, at the same moment, the United States was at a peak of political turmoil and pessimism, owing to the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the era’s political assassinations.
Stan defines his middle-class life as having both the privilege and the dissonance of isolation; he comes to the realization that there were big problems in the world and in the country, ones that adults all around him took very seriously, but that, for him, were a media phenomenon of newspapers, radio, and, above all, television. “Apollo 10 1/2” is also a fanatical catalogue of mass culture, of the television shows (popular and unpopular) that obsessed him and that he recalls along with the specific design of the television sets of the era and their peculiarities (the ends of the antennas atop his parents’ own model are wrapped in foil to improve the reception). Reruns, test patterns, Saturday-morning cartoons, Dick Cavett’s Janis Joplin interview, and the once-a-year broadcast of “The Wizard of Oz” all figure in the action, as do baseball cards (specific ones), board games, snack foods, school lunches, and pop music, whether the Top Forty that his younger siblings listened to or his eldest sister’s sophisticated album-rock psychedelia. And so, of course, do movies, with detailed recollections of theatres and drive-ins, what he saw and who he went with, and what the films themselves meant to him at the time (as in a nerdy baseball-field explanation of “2001” and a shout-out to “Countdown,” a moon-walk movie directed by Robert Altman).
By the time that Stan, following rigorous training, reaches the moon (in a twist that’s too good, and too central, to spoil), it’s one small step for a boy who is a linked-in and deeply acculturated member of humankind. The depths of his connection to the wider world also run to the era’s cruelties (including the prevalence of corporal punishment), the rough games that kids played and the dangers that they were unquestioningly exposed to, and the burgeoning awareness that his little world was far from representative. He learns that the space program itself is controversial, and that nasa is almost all white, as is his own neighborhood and school. Stan recalls the beginnings of his discernment of a gap between his family, his milieu, and the world at large.
Even these dissonances form a part of the movie’s great, grand harmonies: along with its passionate emphasis on the power of observation and memory, the movie’s blend of autobiography and fantasy also defines and expands the very notion of experience. For Linklater, television and movies and music, the effluvia of street games and consumer goods and industrial design, are essential experiences—and fantasies themselves, as recalled in later years, are also basic elements of lived experience. “Apollo 10 1/2” unites the inner and outer life in a form of cultural autobiography, and it does so with a unique sense of cinematic style and form. It takes a place of honor alongside such other recent films as “The French Dispatch,” “Zola,” and “C’mon C’mon,” in which multilevel narrative complexity refines and amplifies characters’—and filmmakers’—emotional expression. Like Terence Davies in such films as “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Neon Bible,” Linklater deploys such an original cinematic form to explore the development of an artist’s sensibility, the infrastructure of his own creative drive.