Fly Me to the Moon

August 16, 2008

Rated: G Runtime: 84 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Most of this summer’s animated movies have been about space: WALL-E, SPACE CHIMPS, STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS. But FLY ME TO THE MOON isn’t science fiction (well, not if you can accept cute anthropomorphized flies, anyway)
Fly Me To The Moon
It depicts the 1969 Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, from the point of view of some kid houseflies who stow away on it.

And perhaps appropriately for a film featuring houseflies in space, the real astronaut they got to recreate his voice is… BUZZ Aldrin!

This is the first theatrical-length animated film made completely in digital 3-D, so you’ll have the glasses in the theater (it’s not being shown in any theaters without the 3-D effect). The 3-D animation is impressive.

Can you make an animated housefly cute? This movie manages it, although they don’t look much like flies. Also, we even get cute maggots.

Our hero, Nate, is a young housefly fascinated with the impending first Moon landing, and as it happens, his housefly family lives right across the water from the launchpad in Florida. His pals, a nerd and a fat kid (and this movie isn’t afraid to poke fun at the fat kid!) are also space-crazy.

Nate’s grandfather (Voiced by Christopher Lloyd) tells Nate how back in 1932 he stowed away on Amelia Earhart’s solo flight across the Atlantic (Mysteriously, she lands in Paris; in reality, she landed in Ireland). So we get some Amelia Earhart 3-D sneezing and snot effects.

This tale inspires Nate and his pals to stowaway aboard the Apollo 11 space capsule.

It occurs to me that, for some kids who will see this, this movie will probably be their main source of info about the Apollo program. As such, it’s a fairly accurate Cliff Notes of how Apollo 11 went.

This movie was made by Belgians, but it’s very gung-ho about the American space program of yesteryear.

This is definitely a film for younger kids, but the 3-D animation is pretty cool.

Posted by Mack Guffin | Filed Under 3 Stars, Animated, Buzz Aldrin, Christopher Lloyd, Robert Patrick, Theatrical 

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Comments

One Response to “Fly Me to the Moon”

  1. Mack Guffin on August 16th, 2008 6:50 am

    Trailer for FLY ME TO THE MOON on YouTube.

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