Review: Glen Keane’s Feature Directorial Debut “Over the Moon”
Pearl Studios is no stranger to big budget computer animated films, having collaborated with DreamWorks Animation last year to produce Abominable, a good looking film that often treaded on familiar story patterns seen in a lot of recent animated films. For Over the Moon, they collaborated with Netflix to bring the film directly to the streaming service’s subscribers as well as theatrically for cinemagoers to enjoy on the big screen. But they also worked with legendary Disney animator Glen Keane as the director, who previously directed the award winning short film Dear Basketball with the late Kobe Bryant. With the talented animators involved from around the world, does the film end up shining brightly?
Written by the late Audrey Wells (who previously wrote The Hate U Give and A Dog’s Purpose), the film follows the imaginative and clever Fei Fei (voiced by Cathy Ang) as she struggles to accept her father Ba Ba (John Cho) moving on from the death of her mother with welcoming his new fiancée Mrs Zhong (Sandra Oh) and her son Chin (Robert G Chiu) into their family. Holding onto her mother’s stories of Chang’e, the goddess who lives on the moon, she decides to build a rocket to escape from home and prove that she is real from her apprehensive family.
While the film starts out well with introducing the characters and the world that they have built based on the Chinese traditions and landscapes, it is only when Fei Fei reaches the moon and unexpectedly finds a world there that the film does loose itself with all the imaginative ideas. It presents itself with a lot of creative settings and some emotional musical sequences, but there are a lot of unnecessary amount of ideas crammed into it that does get in the way of the simplicity of the story and often feels like it gets padded out rather than enhancing the experience. The scenes, for the most part, just don’t feel emotionally connected to one another as they could have been.
OVER THE MOON – (L-R) “Father” (voiced by John Cho), “Fei Fei” (voiced by Cathy Ang) and “Mother” (voiced by Ruthie Ann Miles). © 2020 Netflix, Inc.
But while the story may not be strong, the same can’t be said for the animation which is absolutely one of the best available on Netflix and out of the releases of this year. The rustic and traditional Chinese designs between Fei Fei’s town and the colourful and overly expressive characters and locations on the Moon certainly create a lot of gorgeous variety to the film.
Some of these ideas may not feel connected so easily in a narrative sense, but these mixture of ideas do continuously show off the talents from the animators under Glen Keane’s direction and how they are able to transform the characters and the multiple locations with the use of magic. From Chang’e’s surprisingly large amount of costume changes to match her emotions and songs to exploring the moon’s dark surface with giant green illuminated frogs leaping over craters, all of the elements used to create these scenes are all used effectively for audiences to enjoy.
OVER THE MOON © 2020 Netflix, Inc.
Over the Moon may be another gorgeous animated film from Pearl Studios and continue to brilliantly represent the Chinese culture in a beautiful way, but the story does suffer with too many ideas that don’t always organically stick together.
Over the Moon is now available on Netflix UK, and you can listen to our interview with Glen Keane here.