Over the Moon
“Is Over the Moon an Asian American story or a Chinese one? It tries to be both and winds up feeling like neither.”
Title: Over the Moon (2020)
Directors: Glen Keane 👨🏼🇺🇸 and John Kahrs 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Audrey Wells 👩🏼🇺🇸 in consultation with Jennifer Yee McDevitt 👩🏻🇺🇸 and Alice Wu 👩🏻🇺🇸🌈
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 3.25/5
Last week, the animated family film Over the Moon from Pearl Studio landed on Netflix. It follows a young protagonist as she journeys to the moon, but Glen Keane’s feature debut feels less transportive, at least from a narrative standpoint.
We’ve seen this before: A young hero, in this case Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) whose mother recently passed away, dreams of something more than her surroundings. By some means of deus ex machina, she travels far, even across dimensions. The hero eventually comes home a changed person, her lesson learned.
Despite a touching backstory, where Audrey Wells wrote the film’s script for her husband and daughter while knowing she had cancer, the onscreen result feels far more standard. By adapting a Chinese legend, Keane, co-director John Kahrs, and Wells do offer a new angle to conventional beats. But its undefined locale and broad characterizations dull its cultural impact.
Even the art direction feels undercooked. Besides the sumptuous contributions of Beijing costume designer Guo Pei, the cinematography otherwise underwhelms. Gradient blobs, which make up the moonscape that viewers spend so much time observing, feel about as complete as the base layer of an oil painting.
Fei Fei looks across space detritus in the fictional city of Lunaria
These just-enough visuals combined with a predictable story and just-enough cultural specificity leads to a movie that entertains...well, just enough for a Netflix freebie, but not a whole lot more.
Gender: 4.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
With women constituting key roles behind and in front of the “camera,” Over the Moon tidily squares this category away. Wells scripted the story with input from two other women, Jennifer Yee McDevitt (10 Mountains 10 Years) and Alice Wu (The Half of It), while onscreen Fei Fei bucks gender stereotypes by indulging in STEM hobbies. She shows enthusiasm for the new maglev train that’s being built in town, going so far as to explain to two older construction workers how its electromagnetic properties work.
Other women play integral roles too, such as the moon goddess Chang’e (Phillipa Soo) who rules over a sea of luminous citizens called Lunarians. Meanwhile, Fei Fei’s stepmother, Mrs. Zhong (Sandra Oh) instigates Fei Fei’s emotional journey, as the young teenager must make peace with her mother’s passing in order to move on and embrace new family members.
Feminism does feel a bit demoted, however, as we see Chang’e obsess over her dead male lover. While this is indeed based on the original legend, watching her maniacally search for an item that will reunite her with her man feels a bit dated. As for Fei Fei, her deepest relationships also involve men: her father (John Cho) and younger stepbrother, Chin (Robert G. Chiu). Fei Fei does spend plenty of time thinking about her mother and coming to terms with having Mrs. Zhong in her life, but those story arcs feel like switches flipped on and off when narratively convenient. In contrast, the complicated love, disappointment, annoyance, and gratitude that colors the way Fei Fei feels about her father and Chin outmaneuver the linear connections we see between the film’s women.
Race: 4.5/5
Over the Moon should be recognized for its all-Asian cast. Big names like Oh, John Cho, Ken Jeong, and Margaret Cho enjoy credits and I really appreciate that the three main characters of Fei Fei, Chin, and Chang’e were reserved for actors of Chinese descent, which demonstrates a commitment to authenticity. I also love that Fei Fei’s Ang is Chinese-Filipina, because Asian American cinema as a whole needs to be more inclusive of Southeast Asians. And while I didn’t recognize Guo Pei by name, when I saw a tweet that placed the Beijing fashion designer as the woman behind Rihanna’s memorable Met Gala gown from 2015, I immediately cooed in excitement and put the movie on.
Perhaps it’s this internationalism—of East Asian diasporic actors and an Afro-Caribbean pop star to help market a Chinese costume designer—that actually contributes to Over the Moon’s sense of cultural ambiguity. Ostensibly, sure, this is based on a Chinese legend and the film’s creative team certainly did their research. In fact, Wells herself published a book in 2001 called The Political Thought of Sun Yat-sen while teaching Chinese history at London University, showing that she had some familiarity and even expertise in some respects.
Consultations from Yee McDevitt and Wu further ensure believability, as did the work of producer Peilin Chou (Taiwanese American) who helped gut-check the story and provide crucial feedback, like putting the kibosh on a moment when Fei Fei’s parents would kiss. (Like Chou, I’ve also never seen my parents kiss. Had the scene remained, the cognitive dissonance would’ve been acute.)
But for whatever reason, these efforts simply don’t translate on a personal level. The mooncakes did elicit some nostalgia, perhaps amplified by the fact I didn’t get to have any this year due to quarantine. But other moments felt almost too easy. For example, Fei Fei drinks bubble tea while doing her homework:
But to me at least, the drink is a social one, taking place outdoors with friends. The rare one I’ll enjoy at home is homemade, poured into a glass with boba fished out by a scrabbling spoon, unless I had the foresight to swipe the correct straws from a bubble tea joint beforehand. (Also, am I the only one worried about ghosts coming to eat the remnants of Fei Fei’s ramen?)
Other details like adults doing calisthenics in an outdoor group seem like a cliché by now. And the buildings in Fei Fei’s town, uniformly old-school and beautiful, feel Disneyfied given the film’s modern timeline.
Ultimately, Over the Moon waffles over its own identity. It doesn’t lean into its Asian Americanness, thanks to a romanticized setting of Somewhere Rural, China. But neither does the film feel particularly Chinese, perhaps a side effect of having white directors, a white screenwriter, and diasporic stars I so strongly associate with cultures unrelated to the mainland. Is Over the Moon an Asian American story or a Chinese one? It tries to be both and winds up feeling like neither.
Mediaversity Grade: B 4.08/5
Keane’s film treads lightly in a lot of areas but generally does a lot of good for the Asian American community. I’m not one to say white directors and writers shouldn’t tell Asian stories—I’m really not in that camp at all. But to Lulu Wang’s point, we should all be thoughtful about whether or not people with lived experience—who have immersed themselves in a culture for years or decades, even if it’s not the culture they were born into—might be uniquely qualified to push and advance the stories of that community, especially when it’s a marginalized one.
I’m reminded of Pixar’s 8-minute film Bao (2018) by Domee Shi which moved me to tears with alarming efficiency. It doesn’t need dialogue or multiple deaths to elicit emotion; details like the pink pastry box that Bao’s mother holds while sitting on the orange seats of an MTA subway car, to the tellingly immigrant outfit she wears—an ever-present visor and puffer vest—to the street stall where she squeezes a napa cabbage to test its firmness all resonate like a tuning fork. Yes, Over the Moon boasts mooncakes and ping pong and zip-up track jackets, which work. But representation entails more than just sprinkling references like you’re salting a soup. In Bao, the suffocating mother-son relationship feels unerringly true, like an arrow buried into a bullseye. In contrast, the family dynamics of Netflix’s offering could translate across any culture. A nice word for it would be “universal,” but “generic” feels more accurate.
Like Over the Moon? Try these other titles featuring Chinese talent.
The Great Wall (2016)
The Farewell (2019)
Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)