It’s a release that went relatively unnoticed. Since the beginning of this month of April, the animated film Apollo 10 1/2 : the rockets of my childhood directed by Richard Linklater (Boyhood) is available on Netflix. And it would be a shame to deprive yourself of it.
The story takes place in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, a few kilometers from NASA’s space center. Stanley, the youngest of six siblings, recalls his joyous youth in consumerist America. sixties. No anti-Vietnam riots or hippies, “for the kids of the suburbs all this happened on television” narrates the voice-over, but drive in, manicured lawns and ice cream parlors.
A city punctuated, in those years, by the race for the stars. Stanley born in Houston in 1960, as the director Richard Linklater, dreams of becoming an astronaut. His father works at NASA where he heads the logistics department, which drives his son to despair: “He couldn’t be further from the astronauts”regrets Stanley. “Honey, not everyone can become an astronaut”objects his mother.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4SPlsUTmnc
In the southern suburbs of Houston, the exploits of NASA are omnipresent: school children watch videos of rocket launches in class, supersonic planes cross the sky at full speed. “The space conquest invaded our culture, we found it everywhere”Stanley recalls as an adult.
The film gives pride of place to the unbridled imagination of the child who in his dreams becomes an astronaut. He imagines himself, thanks to his very good results in mathematics and physics, being selected by two NASA agents to test a prototype of a moon landing vehicle too small to be piloted by an adult astronaut. This is the Apollo 10 1/2 mission.
Richard Linklater, in line with Rebel Generation and Boyhood, confirms his talent for looking at the height of a child.
/2022/04/19/phpRTzrVy.jpg)
A beautiful fable interspersed, sometimes too long, with the narrator’s memories of details of daily life during the sixties. We thus learn that society did not have the same relationship to risk: families were driving at 110 km/h on the motorway with children without belts in the back of the pickup. The progress in science was then a priority: “We were the last, of two generations of children, to have fun following the trucks that were spreading mosquito repellent DDT”.
The animation, of great beauty, gives a crazy charm to this auteur film. The mixture of traditional 2D and motion capture (technique for recording the positions and rotations of objects or members of living beings in order to reproduce them on the screen) is a success, culminating in the first steps on the Moon of the real Apollo 11 mission.
Apollo 10 1/2 : the rockets of my childhood is available on the Netflix streaming platform. Duration 1h38.