Academy says Apollo 10 1/2 by Richard Linklater is animation

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Academy says Apollo 10 1/2 by Richard Linklater is animation

10 November 2022

American filmmaker Richard Linklater’s animated feature, Apollo 10 1/2, is free to be nominated for an Oscar award in the animation category, following a change of heart by the Oscar animation committee. Last month the Academy ruled the feature was based upon too much live-action footage, and accordingly was ineligible for nomination as animation.

According to the Oscars eligibility rules, an animated film is defined as a “motion picture in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique, and usually falls into one of the two general fields of animation: narrative or abstract.”

While Apollo 10 1/2 certainly looks like animation, a technique called rotoscoping was used to make the live-action film used in production look so. The decision is good news for Linklater, and fans of the film. Even if Apollo 10 1/2 had missed out on an animation nomination, it’d doubtless prevail in any other award category it was nominated for, if you ask me.

Apollo 10 1/2, a film by Richard Linklater

10 March 2022

Talk about the trip of a lifetime. American space agency NASA accidently builds an Apollo Moon lander that’s too small for adult astronauts. So the investment doesn’t go to waste, a young boy is clandestinely recruited to take the vessel to the lunar surface, in Apollo 10 1/2, trailer, an animated feature directed by Richard Linklater.

The story of the first moon landing in the summer of 1969 from two interwoven perspectives. It both captures the astronaut and mission control view of the triumphant moment, and the lesser-seen bottom up perspective of what it was like from an excited kid’s perspective, living near NASA but mostly watching it on TV like hundreds of millions of others. It’s ultimately both an exacting re-creation of this special moment in history and a kid’s fantasy about being plucked from his average life in suburbia to secretly train for a covert mission to the moon.

Apollo ten and a half, this is Houston. Do you read?