A young girl voy­ages into out­er space in the Over the Moon trailer

There’s been a sub­tle sea change in kid­die enter­tain­ment over the past decade or so, as school­ing-aged pro­tag­o­nists have gone from cre­ative­ly inclined book­worms to sci­en­tif­ic eggheads. The film indus­try has adopt­ed a new empha­sis on images of young peo­ple in what’re known as the STEM fields of sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and math­e­mat­ics – espe­cial­ly grow­ing girls, who can do any­thing the boys can, include build­ing a rock­et ship.

That’s the gist of Over the Moon, an upcom­ing ani­mat­ed copro­duc­tion between Net­flix and China’s Pearl Stu­dio, in which the preter­nat­u­ral­ly intel­li­gent Fei Fei (voiced by Cathy Ang) decides to take a voy­age into the stars. The first trail­er sur­faced online today with a vision steeped both in fan­ta­sy and rea­son, as the girl uses her aca­d­e­m­ic acu­men to real­ize a sen­sa­tion­al dream.

Fei Fei wants to go into out­er space so that she can meet the leg­endary moon god­dess described in the myths passed down by her par­ents, but once she escapes Earth’s atmos­phere, she finds more than she bar­gained for. The moon hides a bustling civ­i­liza­tion peo­pled by the Lunar­i­ans, unusu­al crea­tures with their own soci­ety, leav­ing Fei Fei to nav­i­gate this col­or­ful and strange new world.

The film boasts a voice cast chock­ablock with Asian tal­ent to match the sub­ject mate­r­i­al spun from Chi­nese her­itage, includ­ing Ken Jeong as Fei Fei’s side­kick Lunar­i­an, Hamil­ton star Phillip­pa Soo as Chang’e the moon god­dess, and John Cho as Fei Fei’s father. (He owns a shop that sells moon­cakes, a treat enjoyed dur­ing the Mid-Autumn Fes­ti­val that pays homage to the moon and lunar deities.) As for a direc­tor, how­ev­er, Net­flix tapped Glen Keane, a recent Oscar win­ner for his Kobe Bryant col­lab­o­ra­tion Dear Bas­ket­ball.

In broad strokes, this sounds like a cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic rework­ing of Georges Méliès’ 1902 short A Trip to the Moon, in which anoth­er jour­ney into space goes side­ways and cross­es our hero’s path with that of unfa­mil­iar organ­isms. But even he did not think to throw in an adorable pet frog named Croak for com­ic relief, so, edge: Keane.

Over the Moon comes to Net­flix world­wide in the fall.