95 min | PG | October 23, 2020 | Netflix
A grieving girl builds a rocket to the moon to prove a goddess of lost love is real. What she finds up there is a neon pop diva stuck in the same grief she is running from. The movie has a real heart buried under a scavenger hunt it did not need.
Fei Fei is a girl in modern China who loses her mother young and clings to the legend her mother told her. The legend says the moon goddess Chang’e waits there for a lost love who never returns. When Fei Fei’s father introduces a new woman and her son into the household, the girl builds a rocket to fly to the moon and prove the goddess is real. She wants to prove that love does not end with death. The film looks like a fantasy adventure about a trip to the moon. It is really about a child refusing to let her mother go.
Cathy Ang voices Fei Fei with stubbornness that reads as grief in disguise. She plays a girl who treats a science project as an argument against loss. Phillipa Soo voices Chang’e as a diva trapped in her own mourning, and Soo lets the glamour crack into something raw and selfish. Robert G. Chiu plays the stepbrother Chin with relentless cheer that wears on Fei Fei and the audience by design. Ken Jeong voices Gobi, a lonely creature exiled to the dark side of the moon, and he undercuts his usual frenetic timing with real ache. John Cho and Sandra Oh ground the earthbound scenes as the father and Mrs. Zhong, the woman Fei Fei refuses to accept.
Glen Keane directs his first feature after decades animating Disney heroines, and the hand-drawn instinct shows in the character movement. Faces stretch and settle with a fluidity that the computer rarely captures. The lunar city Lunaria abandons earthbound color logic for hot neon and chrome, and the production design treats the moon as a pop concert rather than a wasteland. The screenplay by the late Audrey Wells front-loads its emotional thesis and then stuffs the midsection with a scavenger hunt, a motorcycle race, and a pingpong sequence that crowd out the grief. The songs arrive on schedule and leave no residue.
The film works when it sits with sorrow and stalls when it remembers it is a musical adventure for kids. Wells understood the spine of the story. A daughter and a goddess both refuse to mourn, and the film asks whether holding on is love or a trap. Keane gives that idea images worth keeping. The plot keeps interrupting the only thing the movie has to say.