Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, the new Netflix release from Richard Linklater, seemingly marks his return to his most instinctive filmmaking style. The stylized, low-stakes period piece tells the autobiographically-inspired story of Stan (Milo Coy), a young man navigating his childhood amidst the all-encompassing space race that surrounded Houston, Texas in the summer of 1969. In addition to the easygoing, hang-out tone of the film that more broadly threads together Linklater's filmography, though, what is notable is that the film stands as the director's third foray into animation and his first return to the format since his 2006 film, A Scanner Darkly.

Although Apollo 10½ does not use exactly the same techniques (with the process presumably smoothed out since the difficulties Linklater encountered with A Scanner Darkly) it still makes use of a technique similar to the rotoscopic animation that Linklater used for Scanner and 2001's Waking Life. As Linklater is something of an innovator and pioneer of this specific style, you'd be forgiven for assuming the reason behind his inclination towards animation was the same as other filmmakers who use it, i.e. to explore ways of expanding stylistic capabilities. However, when looking at his animated trilogy of films, it seems that this is not the director's primary concern. Linklater has always had a special and unique predilection for film as time capsule, often capturing worlds or characters in one particular location in day-long stints or, on occasion, 12-year-long ones. It is clear through observing this obsession with time and space that his choice of animation for these three films is clearly no accident, but rather part of an adventure in altering the relationship of time and space directly in narratives where they are most suitably abstract.

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A clear illustrative example of this can be found in the escape into the unconscious that is Waking Life, the film that kicked off Linklater's experimentation with animation. Waking Life is a film that focuses on Wiley Wiggins' unnamed character as he quite literally floats through a dreamscape interfacing with various characters on the meanings of life and the universe. So, typical Linklater fare. What marked this out from his previous work though was the problem of presenting the dreamworld -- a dreamworld, specifically, that the viewer might vicariously experience alongside the main character as he placidly and indiscernibly moves through varying locations, like one would when dreaming themselves. With the rotoscopic style causing the image to never rest, the effect of the wobbling, ever-shifting animation is to remove any of the temporal associations that come alongside movement. The consequence of this is that it suspends the viewer in this world for what feels an ambiguous amount of time, again, creating an experience akin to dreaming. Whilst with Slacker or Before Sunrise the passage of time reflected in daylight or the general day-weary affectations of the characters give rise to the feeling of an impending end of the interactions and the film, Waking Life seems suspended in time as a result of its animation, capturing a unique, dreamlike experience.

Originally a novel by Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly was the next animated film from Linklater that used its style to its spatial and temporal advantage, partly to cope with the hurdles that come with adapting any of the venerated sci-fi writer's stories. Centering around Keanu Reeves' undercover cop as he attempts to infiltrate the drug trade, the film is preoccupied with dystopian near-futures, drug-addled minds, and suits that change a person's image so quickly that their identity is imperceptible. It is because of such factors that Linklater's use of animation in this setting is so apt, extending the visual implication of a spatially-shifting identity out to the film as a whole in order to actively capture the anxieties around identity and the objectivity of images that the film plays on.

As well as space, though, this impressionistic aesthetic is still used as a predominant way for Linklater to play around with time, just to very different effect. It is through the animation that the film takes on a timelessness that makes it impossible to place on any dystopian timeline, adding to the feeling of being placed in a familiar, near-future world that has progressed through uncertain developments. Given the original novel was written almost 30 years prior to the film's release, this quality whereby the film is impossible to place on a timeframe made it evermore pertinent then and now still, with the unique quality of the animation stopping it becoming dated compared to today's photorealist alternatives.

Though, there are occasions, particularly given Linklater's penchant for nostalgia and late-20th-century period pieces, when a dated quality is preferred, a notion that brings us to his newest animated release, Apollo 10½. The semi-autobiographical nature of the story does make the motivation behind the animation style all the more layered on this occasion, especially given the fantastical deviations in the story, with a plot strand revolving around Stan being recruited by NASA and sent on a solo mission. It seems obvious given these facts that to some degree the animation was informed by an urge to make these deviations less obstructive, as well as to simply give the film a faded aesthetic synonymous with nostalgia. However, the objectivity at play within the animation doesn't just help to accentuate the childlike fondness of imagination and the tongue-in-cheek way in which Linklater plays with memory and reality, but it also makes for a more interesting angle on the time and space that the characters inhabit once more.

The lack of distinct spatial parameters in the animation allows Linklater to create the feeling that you are literally walking amongst his memories in his mind, with nothing rendered too aesthetically stable to imply absolute historical accuracy. Rather the film captures the general essence of how it felt to be alive at the time. Again, the time-capsule analogy can be employed here, with the specific animated quality of space and time in Apollo 10½ suggesting a memory as a nothing more than a moment faded with age. The ambivalence of memory suggested by this heightens the film's nostalgia in an almost tragic sense, furthering it past simply another narcissistic autobiographical retelling and giving it suitable pause to feel worthy of Linklater's directorial stamp.

With Apollo 10½, it remains clear that Linklater is a filmmaker in complete, thought-out control of his films. Where his characters are lackadaisical and care-free, ostensibly selecting obscure conversational tidbits at random, he is calculated and astute regarding how to best present the concepts and themes of his films visually. It is no coincidence that Linklater continually puts time and space at the forefront of his films, and even less of one that he uses animation to tackle projects dealing with spatially shifting sci-fi narratives, dreamy escapes into the subconscious, and nostalgically creative tales of childhood.