Animated Family Tale Borrows Too Much from Other Sources

There’s a beautiful, unique story occurring on the edges of “Over the Moon” — actually, the primary 20 minutes and the final 5 — however you’ll be able to really feel the studio notes taking on this musical-comedy-adventure from director Glen Keane, a Disney vet and the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind the brief “Dear Basketball.”

The opening sequences are pretty, with our heroine Fei Fei (voiced by Cathy Ang) enraptured as a younger lady by her mom’s tales of moon goddess Chang’e and her unhappiness over her earthbound real love Houyi. Fei Fei’s beloved mother, whose bakery makes the city’s most scrumptious mooncakes, passes away after falling sick.

A couple of years later, Fei Fei’s dad (John Cho) plans to marry once more (his fiancée, the widowed Mrs. Zhong, is voiced by Sandra Oh), which makes Fei Fei upset. The scientifically-minded teen decides to journey to the moon so she will show that Chang’e is actual, as a strategy to remind Fei Fei’s father to stay dedicated to her mom’s reminiscence.

So far, so good; Keane and his animators change from CGI animation to extra conventional hand-drawn to depict the legend of Chang’e; the opening songs turn into the spotlight of the work by composing workforce Christopher Curtis, Marjorie Duffield, and Helen Park; and the mooncakes and pageant dinner are a few of animation’s most mouth-watering culinary creations this aspect of the ham in “Ponyo” and the potato-chip fried rice in “Weathering With You.”

But out of the blue, you’ll be able to really feel the pivot into cribbing from modern animated hits. When Fei Fei sing the movie’s massive “I want” quantity, “Rocket to the Moon,” it seems like a hodgepodge of varied Disney belt-a-thons (“Let It Go,” “Part of Your World,” “Into the Unknown”), with slightly “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” thrown in for good measure. When Fei Fei will get to the moon and meets Chang’e (Phillipa Soo, “Hamilton”), the character appears to take a web page from the requisite untrustworthy/disappointing authority figures/celebrities from the Pixar canon. And when Fei Fei encounters the blobby, brightly-colored, personality-free inhabitants of the moon, one is reminded of the various household movies of late that really feel the necessity to applicable the Minions.

What started with real heartfelt emotion turns into one other madcap “go to the place and get the thing” chase, with Mrs. Zhong’s boisterous son Chin (Robert G. Chiu) tagging alongside on the expedition, and goofy moon-blob Gobi (Ken Jeong) offering ethical help and wisecracks. Animators typically observe, appropriately, that their type of filmmaking isn’t only for youngsters, so it’s miserable to look at this film take a 180 from candy and relatable to noisy and wacky.

There are nonetheless pleasures to be discovered alongside the way in which, from a blinding pair of moon-based griffins who’re a part of Chang’e’s menagerie to the mild classes (within the screenplay by the late Audrey Wells, “The Hate U Give”) about love and loss and letting go. But for each quiet second that lands, there’s a flashy musical quantity or some half-baked character design (the “biker chicks” which are precise chickens are a funnier thought in idea than in execution) that breaks the spell.

It’s nice to have an animated feminine lead that does for science what Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” did for studying, however in the end, “Over the Moon” wanes greater than it waxes.