Richard Linklater has just announced that he’s adding a third rotoscoped animated movie to his library of films—although this latest one sounds a tad more wholesome than 2006's fugue state odyssey A Scanner Darkly. Per Deadline, Linklater is working with Netflix on Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure, a moon landing story with a heavy dose of Boyhood-style nostalgia added on for that proper “coming-of-age” effect.
Starring Jack Black, Zachary Levi, Glen Powell, Josh Wiggins, Milo Coy, Lee Eddy, Bill Wise, Natalie L’Amoreaux, Jessica Brynn Cohen, Sam Chipman, and Danielle Guilbot, the film was shot in live-action back in March, and will now—per the same technique that produced Scanner and Linklater’s earlier Waking Life—be drawn over by animators to create the rotoscoped effect. The narrative reportedly follows two lines, one focused directly on the people striving to execute the Apollo 11 moon landing in summer 1969, and the other on a young boy watching from his home, swept up in the throes of moon fever. (Figurative moon fever, that is. There’s no actual fever on the moon. Do not ask questions about moon fever.) You will not be especially shocked, then, to learn that Richard Linklater himself was just shy of 9 years old when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon, which helps to explain his enthusiasm for the project.
“It struck me years ago that this was my film to make, from both a chronological and proximity level. I was there, going into 3rd grade,” Linklater said in a statement today. “Our unique animation style allows both the conjuring of a world long gone, and the flowing, playful expression of memory and imagination. It’s been a fun, creative journey to incorporate things like 3D graphics into a live action shoot to help bring this story to life.”