36 | New Scientist | 16 April 2022
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The film column
WHAT we really seek in space
is “not knowledge, but wonder,
beauty, romance, novelty – and
above all, adventure”, sci-fi writer
Arthur C. Clarke told the American
Aeronautical Society in 1967, as
the gloss was beginning to flake
off the Apollo project.
By the time Apollo 11 launched
on 16 July 1969, NASA’s bid to land
astronauts on the moon (the most
expensive civilian undertaking
in history) couldn’t help but be
overshadowed by the even more
costly Vietnam war.
Only a little of this trickles into
the consciousness of 10-year-old
Stan (newcomer Milo Coy) as he
propels himself on his Schwinn
bike around Houston, North
America’s own “Space City”. His
father is one of the 400,000 small
cogs who contributed to the space
programme – but this is enough
to inspire a whole other reality in
Stan’s head, in which he is hired
for a secret Apollo test flight before
the grown-ups blast off to glory.
Jack Black (whose engineer
mother worked on Apollo 13’s
life-saving abort-guidance
system) plays Stan as an adult.He is a narrator whose perspectives
have widened to take in the
politics of the time, but not in
a way that undercuts the story.
Directed by Richard Linklater,
Apollo 10½: A space age childhood
is, in the best sense, an innocent
film, an animation about wonder,
beauty and adventure. It isn’t so
much a nostalgic movie as one
about childhood’s possibilities
and fantasies.The film uses interpolated
rotoscoping, a method developed
by art director Bob Sabiston for
another Linklater film, Waking
Life, in 2001. Sabiston’s Rotoshop
software let artists draw over
QuickTime files, much as Max
Fleischer drew over movie stills
to pioneer rotoscoped animation
in the 1910s.
When you rotoscope using
software, you can trace everyStan’s secret mission The intelligent, moving Apollo 10½ is an animation about
the fantasy world of a child obsessed with the space race. It took 18 years to make,
and ended up owing as much to a movie pioneer as to high tech, says Simon Ings“ Apollo 10½, which
its director noodled
over for 18 years,
has taken longer
than the space race”frame, or space out your tracing
and let the computer fill in the
missing frames – a process called
interpolation. This creates an
interesting effect because the
computer doesn’t understand the
physical structure of the objects
you are rotoscoping, and tries
to find the most direct path to
morph one shape into another.
Rotoshop worked a treat for the
surreal meanderings of Waking
Life, but keeled over somewhat
in 2006 when a frantic studio
expected it to speed up production
of Linklater’s adaptation of the
Philip K. Dick classic, A Scanner
Darkly. It couldn’t and it didn’t.
Sixteen years on, Apollo 10½
realises Sabiston’s original 2½D
conception. But that is only
partly down to better tech. In
fact, Linklater used traditional
rotoscoping. The two-year hiatus
caused by covid-19 gave him and
his team the time they needed.
Time is rarely on the side of
the film-maker, but Linklater has
chiselled out a unique relationship
with the stuff, particularly with
Boyhood, filmed from 2002 to 2013
with the same cast. Apollo 10½,
which Linklater noodled over
for 18 years, has taken longer
than the space race.
Most studios would struggle
with such timescales, so it is
no surprise to find Apollo 10½
streaming on Netflix. Its 222 million
subscribers already sit at their
screens, waiting to be entertained.
Relieved of the need to recoup
single, heavy investments over
relatively few weekends, Netflix
can work constructively with
its artists. On the evidence of
Apollo 10½ alone, it looks like
we can bury fears that streaming
will kill the feature film. ❚NETFLIXStan (Milo Coy) creates a
fantasy where he beats
the adults into spaceFilm
Apollo 10½: A space
age childhood
Richard Linklater
NetflixSimon also
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No Requiem for
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Matthew Tribbe
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Matthew Tribbe sets aside
fond reminiscences of the
Apollo years and reveals
the issues that dogged the
project from its inception.Simon Ings is a novelist and
science writer. Follow him on
Instagram @simon_ings