Over the Moon

One of the most stun­ning and con­cep­tu­al­ly excit­ing moments of Over the Moon lands ear­ly. As Fei Fei (Cathy Ang)’s par­ents retell the Chi­nese leg­end of Chung’e (Philli­pa Soo), a god­dess who resides on the moon, for­ev­er sep­a­rat­ed from her love Houyi, the pic­ture seam­less­ly tran­si­tions from impres­sive­ly ren­dered CG ani­ma­tion to sketchy hand-drawn frames. Direc­tor Glen Keane over­laps the family’s affec­tion for tra­di­tion­al tales with an appre­ci­a­tion of tra­di­tion­al animation.

Beyond the retelling of the leg­end, some 3D scenes have play­ful 2D doo­dles danc­ing around in the back­ground dur­ing a mon­tage of the main char­ac­ter work­ing on her rock­et. A long-time char­ac­ter ani­ma­tor for Dis­ney, hav­ing worked on almost all of the studio’s ani­mat­ed out­put since Pete’s Drag­on in 1977, Keane dis­plays equal rev­er­ence for tac­tile, hand-drawn work as well as the poten­tial of the more unteth­ered com­put­er animation.

Over the Moon engages with tra­di­tion on mul­ti­ple lev­els, made in the mould of the kind of Dis­ney films that Keane used to work on. One such way: despite what Netflix’s trail­ers sug­gest, this is actu­al­ly a musi­cal, with most­ly ser­vice­able songs mar­ried to a mov­ing sto­ry about a child deal­ing with the loss of a loved one. The tale of Chang’e is inher­ent­ly con­nect­ed to Fei-Fei’s mem­o­ry of her moth­er, her belief in the leg­end inher­ent­ly tied to her refusal to accept her father’s (John Cho) new rela­tion­ship with Mrs Zhong (San­dra Oh), of self­ish­ness born from grief.

Many plot points will be instant­ly famil­iar to old­er view­ers: a child’s refusal to move on; a parent’s new love; the encroach­ment of new step sib­lings. You can cal­cu­late the tra­jec­to­ry of each arc the moment it begins. To be fair, one can eas­i­ly imag­ine chil­dren being swept up in the film’s bold colours. Adults should find a lot to love in the visu­als as well, as the sto­ry shifts from the lush greens of Fei Fei’s home­town to the cold, expan­sive neg­a­tive spaces of the moon, to the lumi­nous, abstract shapes of Lume­ria, the hid­den moon king­dom ruled over by Chang’e herself.

Through­out Over the Moon, Keane applies the sen­si­bil­i­ties of 2D ani­ma­tion to 3D, often flat­ten­ing images to a sin­gle plane and, once Fei Fei arrives on the moon, sim­i­lar­ly flat­ten­ing the brighter tones of Lume­ria. So while the sto­ry hard­ly rein­vents the com­ing-of-age wheel, cer­tain styl­is­tic touch­es make it feel less disposable.

Lat­er, Chang’e’s (re)introduction as an immor­tal diva pop idol – burst­ing onto the scene in Alexan­dra McQueen-esque get-up – marks a shift not just in the film’s art style but in its music as well, mov­ing from a (fair­ly lit­er­al) clas­si­cal style of musi­cal num­ber to (still fair­ly lit­er­al) dance pop and even hip-hop. While this means that the film is always visu­al­ly engag­ing, the rest would have ben­e­fit­ted from more focus.

The main cast could real­ly have done with some more time togeth­er, instead of being inter­rupt­ed by var­i­ous zany sup­port­ing char­ac­ters (includ­ing a most­ly annoy­ing mas­cot char­ac­ter voiced by Ken Jeong). Despite this and the odd­ly paced, paint-by-num­bers nar­ra­tive, the visu­als tru­ly pop, and the film is at once unpre­dictable and daz­zling in its com­bi­na­tion of dif­fer­ent tech­niques and styles.