Fly to the Moon – Fly Me to the Moon (2008)

Directed by: Ben Stassen | 85 minutes | animation, adventure, family | Dutch voice cast: Britt Vanderborght, Walter Baele, Govert Deploige, Mieke Bouve, Herbert Bruynseels, Vic De Wachter, Sven De Ridder, Muriel Bats

Nat (Thieme Vandeput) has heard countless times from his grandfather (Jef Demedts) the story of how he was aboard Amelia Earhart’s plane during her transatlantic flight. Despite being only a small fly, he personally made sure that the famous pilot did not crash, but successfully completed the risky journey. A trip to the moon, however, was not in it. The moment he steps into the pod that launches a monkey into space, he is brutally knocked down like a troublesome fly. Just like his grandfather, Nat wants to experience a great adventure. When the Americans for the first time launch a manned rocket, the ‘Apollo 11’, with the aim of landing on the moon, he just has to be there. Together with his friends IQ (Emiel Claes) and Scooter (Britt Vanderborght), he manages to board the rocket and even fly to the moon. The home front is very worried, but also proud. Nothing seems to stand in the way of a hero’s story, but it is the time of the Cold War and Russian flies can’t be trusted either.

This animated film evokes mixed feelings. The story is very messy with incomprehensible sidesteps and digressions that are barely logical for an adult, let alone for the little ones for whom the film is intended. They might get over that effortlessly in their innocence, but even for the youngest kids, for whom a weird twist of mind doesn’t always have to be an obstacle to viewing pleasure, the 3D animation will lose its appeal at some point with so many randomly arranged scenes and adventures. The film is nowhere funny, nor is it exciting and the moving scenes are sometimes literally soporific. The technical implementation is pleasing to the eye, but also exhausting. Watching for half an hour is still fine and the surprise effect forces breathless admiration for so much technical ingenuity for exactly that long, but after that the holes in the story seem to get bigger and bigger, the bad texts become more and more annoying and eventually even that wonderful animation technique starts to resist .

In addition, the glasses with which you are forced to watch the film are also a kind of ‘one-size-fits-all’. If you’re not careful, you’re more likely to be tinkering with what can be called a torture device out of sheer boredom than you’ll feel like making an effort to follow the muddled story. But perhaps small inventors will be inspired to better design, and this whole undertaking will still serve an unforeseen but useful purpose.