Inventive 3-D lifts 'Moon' above silliness

August 15, 2008|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

"Fly Me to the Moon" is a computer-animated kiddie flick about three housefly best friends who buzz their way onto the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. That sounds as genuinely painful as an August dog-days release can be, and it would be, except for two things. One, if you're 6 years old, you probably never realized how insanely cool the 1969 moon landing was in all its rocket-geek details. Two, what the filmmakers do with 3-D here is within shouting distance of art.

The director, Ben Stassen, has been making 3-D and IMAX shorts for a decade or so, and somewhere along the line he, like us, got tired of jabbing audiences in the eyeballs with yo-yos and tape measures. Instead, "Fly Me to the Moon" uses 3-D technology for something far more satisfying: creating a sense of enchanting, ever-shifting visual depth.

You notice it right off: At the screening I attended, the first shot of a swampy pond extending off into the distant mist (cattails in the foreground) drew gasps of astonishment from not only the children but their parents. Nothing had happened yet, but the setting seemed charged, hyperreal.

Throughout the film, the Belgium-based 3-D house nWave works against our expectations: Instead of a limited number of animated planes of depth, "Fly Me to the Moon" evokes infinite gradations. Instead of launching objects out at us, the film sends characters flying in over our heads from the back of the theater, eliciting dismayed cries and swatting motions. For the first time in my experience, a 3-D movie felt bigger than my ability to take it all in.

The story line, unfortunately, is miniscule. "A Bug's Life" gone retro-rocket, "Moon" is set at Cape Canaveral in 1969 and follows three young boy flies - heroic Nat (voiced by Trevor Gagnon), brainiac IQ (Philip Bolden), and fat, lazy slob Scooter (David Gore) - as they scheme to sneak aboard the Apollo 11 launch. Trying to hold them back is Nat's mom (Kelly Ripa); cheering them on is his retired-aviator Grandpa (Christopher Lloyd) and adorable little maggot siblings.

(That's right: maggots. They're pink and wriggly and have big grins and "cute" eyes, none of which keeps them from being thoroughly revolting. Between these guys, last year's "Ratatouille," and the cockroach sidekick in "WALL-E," vermin are the current must-have family movie accessory. Leeches, call your agents. Wait, that's redundant.)