OSCARS 2021: Over the Moon (2020)

At this point, it's fair to say that Netflix is the most powerful campaigner at the Oscars. Streaming services were going to dominate 2021's awards season anyway but Netflix has a record eighteen movies nominated this year. This is the second year in a row the streaming giant has two movies nominated in the Animated Feature category. Pushing out off-beat choices like “Marona's Fantastic Tale,” “Weathering With You,” and “Lupin III: The First” are two Netflix distributed cartoons: “Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon” and... “Over the Moon?” What the fuck is “Over the Moon?” At least, that was the question I was asking myself on the day the nominations were announced. I guess the time has come to discover what the fuck “Over the Moon” is exactly.

Fei Fei loves to celebrate the Chinese moon festival with her mom and dad, as she's fascinated with the legend of Chang'e, the moon goddess. Shortly after the festival, Fei Fei's mom falls ill and dies. Four years later, her dad is planning to remarry, bringing an annoying little brother, Chin, into Fei Fei's life. She becomes obsessed with the idea of heading to the moon and bringing back proof of Chang'e's existence, certain this will change her dad's mind. She builds a home-made rocket ship and successfully reaches the moon, Chin unknowingly stowing away. Yet Chang'e is not the goddess Fei Fei was expecting, as her heart has been frozen by centuries of loneliness and pain. 

Throughout the first twenty minutes of “Over the Moon,” I was genuinely baffled by the faint praise I had read for this movie. Everything about the movie was underwhelming to me. The character design were deeply generic, an unimaginable attempt to replicate the Disney and Pixar house style. The big eyes and round faces are present, along with a tomboy protagonist, highly marketable animal sidekicks, and a curvy female relative for the weirdos to drool over. The songs are similarly desperate to replicate the Disney style. Every song in the movie is full of huge deliveries and sweeping melodies. All the songs want to be “Let It Go,” even the quasi-rap number about ping-pong. The result is that none of the musical numbers, with their ungainly lyrics and same-y sound, stick in the mind at all.

 

Once Fei Fei and her terrible step-brother-to-be arrive on the moon, I started to get why some people like “Over the Moon.” The lunar sequences are very colorful. Chang'e lives in a city made of day-glo, surreal structures. She's surrounded by brightly color sidekicks shaped like the often referenced moon cakes. As Chang'e introduces herself, via another forgettable song, she wears a swirling outfit of lights and steps down a series of neon colored disc. “Over the Moon” really commits to this bright color palette. Later, a chase scene even has Fei Fei and her friends speeding along avenue of yet more pulsating color. If everything thing else about the film is utterly bland and generic, at least the neon coloring scheme is something to remember.

Ultimately, all the impressive colors in the world can't make up for characters we don't care about and a plot you can't connect to emotionally. Chin, her new little brother, is absolutely grating in every scene he's in. Chang'e is the pettiest of villains. Fei Fei's trauma over her mom's death is nothing we haven't seen before. We barely meet her mom, so we feel no connection to her at all. The sense of loss, that's supposed to link Fei Fei and Chang'e, is hackneyed. Most of the characters are extended lame jokes, such as a group of cartoon chickens riding motorcycles who are called Biker Chicks. Har har. Or the bright green pangolin creature, voiced by a very loud Ken Jeong, Fei Fei encounters on the mood. When “Over the Moon” has no other ideas about what to do, they throw in jokes about astronaut diapers or frog tongues.

The novelty of “Over the Moon,” I suppose, is that it is steeped in another culture's mythology. If a little Chinese-American kid feels seen or represented in this big budget animated film, I guess that justifies “Over the Moon's” existence. (I assume it's a big budget production, though the actual character animation is pretty underwhelming.) Yet basing the movie in Chinese mythology also feels like a very cynical attempt to grab oversea dollars in the world's fastest growing film market. Save for a few pretty images, I have nothing to recommend about “Over the Moon.” Is it nice that an original I.P. scored a nomination over something like a DreamWorks sequel? Maybe. But not so much when Netflix could've pushed “The Willoughbys,” a far better and more visually interesting, animated feature over this one. [4/10]