Over the Moon (2020)
Directed by Glen Keane
Partly — Over the Moon is somewhat woke, scoring 45 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Netflix and Pearl Studio's Over the Moon arrives with a mandate it wears lightly: a Chinese myth retold for a global audience, animated with the polish of a studio veteran making his directorial debut.
Consciousness Markers
The entire principal voice cast is Asian and Asian-American, deliberately assembled for a culturally specific Chinese story. The film was built around authentic cultural casting (informally called
Fei Fei is a resourceful girl who builds her own rocket, and the film centers several prominent women (Chang'e, Mrs. Zhong, the aunts, the Biker Chicks). The female-led framing is present but not framed as an explicit feminist argument.
The film celebrates Chinese culture, the Moon Festival, and Chinese mythology with specificity, but it is not organized around themes of racial injustice or racial identity politics.
The film carries emotional themes about grief and moving on, conveyed through song and story rather than preachy social messaging. Mild moral instruction at most.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear anywhere in the narrative.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No critique of capitalism, wealth, or class systems appears in the film.
No body positivity themes or messaging about body image appear.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film adapts a mythological legend, not a historical event, so no revisionist historical reframing is present.
Why it received this score
Netflix and Pearl Studio's Over the Moon arrives with a mandate it wears lightly: a Chinese myth retold for a global audience, animated with the polish of a studio veteran making his directorial debut. Glen Keane's film follows Fei Fei, a girl who builds a rocket from fireworks and lantern paper to prove that the moon goddess Chang'e exists. The voice cast is entirely Asian and Asian-American, assembled with intent. Cathy Ang, Phillipa Soo, Sandra Oh, John Cho, and the Cho sisters of comedy fill out a world that treats the Moon Festival as lived experience, not set dressing. This is the film's most deliberate gesture, and it executes it without a single line of explanation. Nobody announces the casting. The culture simply is the setting.
The story's emotional architecture rests on grief and the difficulty of letting go, a theme it handles through song and the occasional giant toad. Fei Fei is resourceful and self-directed, building her own vehicle and piloting her own grief, and the film surrounds her with women of consequence: a stepmother, aunts, a moon goddess in Guo Pei couture, and a gang of biker chicks who steal a doll and leave. Whether this constitutes an argument about anything is debatable. The film is content to let a girl be capable and leave the thesis unwritten. The Chinese cultural specificity is rich and unapologetic, though it stops well short of making any claim about race as a social problem. It is a celebration, not a critique.
Elsewhere the film is remarkably unburdened. No capitalist is devoured. No climate is mourned. No body is praised or shamed. No mind is diagnosed. The mythological source material is adapted, not revised, since legend is not history and Chang'e owes no correction to anyone. What moral instruction exists arrives gently, mostly through a pangolin who was exiled for a song about moving on, which is a punishment few films would dare to impose. The result is a children's musical that trusts its audience to absorb its values through color and melody. A rare thing, and a quiet one.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Fueled by memories of her mother, resourceful Fei Fei builds a rocket to the moon on a mission to prove the existence of a legendary moon goddess.
Questions about Over the Moon
Is Over the Moon woke?
Partly — Over the Moon is somewhat woke, scoring 45 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Woke-Adjacent.
What makes Over the Moon woke?
3 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (72), Feminist Agenda (45) and Racial Consciousness (40). On Representation Casting: The entire principal voice cast is Asian and Asian-American, deliberately assembled for a culturally specific Chinese story.
How does Over the Moon compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #33 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.