Even by Richard Linklater’s sometimes shaggy standards of what makes a narrative film, this movie is barely a movie. More of a memory or animated documentary about what it was like growing up in the space age of the 1960s. And it’s pretty wonderful.

Apollo 10½ is animated using the rotoscoping technique Linklatter previously used in A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. It’s likely an autobiographical account of what it was like growing up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas… in the shadow of NASA and the Apollo project. What the kids listened to on the radio and watched on tv, what it was like to experience Baskin Robbins for the first time, to see the first domed sports arena, the first with its lite-up signs, Astroturf, to crowd six kids in the bed of a pickup, to chase fumigation trucks, etc.

There’s barely a story here – for the first half of the film, it’s just one memory after another as narrated by Jack Black. This wasn’t my childhood but a lot of my memories were reruns of these tidbits so I got contact high nostalgia. I suspect the more you can relate to this care-free, borderline irresponsible time, the more you’ll enjoy the film. If you have, for instance, no memory of The Monkees (or of Monkees re-runs), this flick might not appeal too you… in which case, watch it anthropologically – it might still be fun.

The film does have a rough through-line where we follow the family during the launch of Apollo 11 and the first moonwalk. It partly does this through the narrator’s fantasy of being the first kid to walk on the moon… as in Apollo 10½. I’d have preferred the movie without these flights of fantasy… but it doesn’t hurt the film either so I’ll allow it.

I’m not sure ultimately what the point of the film is other than to be a documentary about a by-gone childhood in a version of America that was more care-free and sheltered from the reality of the Vietnam war, race riots, assassinations, and the like. I can see some people thinking it’s just self-indulgent crap… and it might just be. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it wasn’t accurate, and doesnt’ mean it wasn’t important to Richard Linklater though.

Score: 88