journal features

movie review - Over the Moon

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2020.11.21

This is a kids' movie from a Chinese studio that features an ancient tale from that same country of a goddess who winds up stranded on the moon / living in association with the moon. The main character is an inventor kid who designs a rocket ship to find the Goddess. There are a surprising number of tropes in this one ranging from "dead mother" to "little boisterous boy cousin" (sub-type two: Chinese round-faced over-eater (as opposed to sub-type one: red-headed trouble-maker possibly with a broken or missing tooth)) and "small child is technical genius". Half-way to the moon, they run into mythical creatures that I think are meant to be Asian dog-demons. And from there they meat the Goddess herself and that's where things get tricky.

Because this is a god of the old school; scheming, self-interested, and carrying a rather massive chip on her shoulder.

This thing has its own fluid drawing style that steers well clear of uncanny valley awkwardness and I think suits the story well. It is, however, a musical and liberally so.

Recommended. For "movie night" with the kids.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton