The first trail­er for Richard Linklater’s ani­mat­ed kid flick Apol­lo 10 ¹⁄₂ has achieved liftoff

Richard Lin­klater is respon­si­ble for some of the head­i­est fea­ture-length car­toons in the recent Amer­i­can cin­e­ma, from the the­o­ret­i­cal phi­los­o­phiz­ing of Wak­ing Life to the dense­ly con­cep­tu­al sci-fi of his Phillip K. Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly. Those films were both pro­duced using an inno­v­a­tive tech­nique called roto­scop­ing (by which illus­tra­tion is over­laid on live-action footage of actors), a method that Lin­klater will return to for his next film.

He’ll take his ani­ma­tion in a more kid-friend­ly direc­tion with Apol­lo 10 ¹⁄₂: A Space Age Child­hood, the first trail­er for which touched down online just this morn­ing. Lin­klater returns to the nos­tal­gia-rosy 1970s of his own boy­hood, pre­vi­ous­ly vis­it­ed in Dazed and Con­fused as well as Every­body Wants Some!!, for anoth­er look at the off-kil­ter side of the good ol’ days.

A boy grow­ing up in Linklater’s home state of Texas watch­es the esca­la­tion of the space race through wide eyes, as Amer­i­ca scram­bles to beat the Rooskies into orbit and shore up the nation­al sense of morale. In this tran­si­tion­al moment — hip­pies have begun to infil­trate the neigh­bor­hood, though it’s some­times tricky to iden­ti­fy them and trick­i­er to for­mu­late your own opin­ion on their lifestyle — a pair of G‑men (voiced by Linklater’s past col­lab­o­ra­tors Glen Pow­ell and Jack Black) claim­ing to be from NASA recruit the ele­men­tary-school­er for a once-in-a-life­time mission.

He’s just the right size to fit in the lunar mod­ule the gov­ern­ment acci­den­tal­ly designed slight­ly too small, an indi­ca­tion of the film’s wry sense of humor. (Are you so good at math that you’ve nev­er made a mis­take?) While his coun­try watch­es with bat­ed breath, the boy under­goes a con­densed train­ing reg­i­men and gets ready to make his wildest dreams a real­i­ty, even if the con­fi­den­tial nature of the risky flight means no one will ever know of his bravery.

Between the cast, the set­ting, the sub­ject mate­r­i­al, and the ani­ma­tion style, this project could not be more square­ly in Linklater’s com­fort zone. Some have crit­i­cized him for a reluc­tance to chal­lenge him­self, but for those of us dialed in to his spe­cif­ic fre­quen­cy, there’s no com­plaints about more of the same. He’s the only guy dish­ing it up, after all.

Apol­lo 10 ¹⁄₂: A Space Age Child­hood comes to Net­flix in the UK and US on 1 April.