‘Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood’ Review: Richard Linklater’s Sweet Animated Flashback to Growing Up in 1969
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film CriticEverybody knows the name of the first man to step foot on the moon, but how many have heard the story of the kid who walked there before him?
Richard Linklater’s “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood” reflects one of the director’s childhood fantasies, informed by growing up in South Texas, a stone’s throw from Johnson Space Center, at the time NASA was trying to do the impossible. “Houston, we have a problem,” he playfully imagines the organization’s top scientists saying, “We accidentally built a lunar module a little too small.” Ergo, they need a 10 1/2-year-old to go up in Neil Armstrong’s place.As someone slightly younger than Linklater who also spent his formative years in Texas, it’s impossible to overstate how much I adore that premise and the collection of associations it brings up for the “Boyhood” director.
Significantly advancing the rotoscope animation style he used in “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly” two decades earlier, Linklater spends most of this winsome film’s running time reminiscing about what life was like in 1969, back when the U.S.
was neck-and-neck with the Soviet Union in the space race, and kids rehearsed “duck and cover” drills at school, just in case the Russians dropped an atomic bomb down the street.
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