Beneath the spirited fantasy, big musical numbers and uplifting story, Over The Moon – Netflix’s first foray into animation – is actually the sad and heartbreaking gift from a dying writer to her husband and daughter. The project was commissioned by producer Peilin Chou of Shanghai’s Pearl Studios in 2017 and Audrey Wells was brought in as the screenwriter before long-time Disney animator and Oscar winner Glen Keane came on board as director. A prolific writer, Wells died from cancer in 2018 just as production on Over The Moon began. “At that time, I did not know that she had cancer and that she would not survive,” Keane recalls. “One day she invited me to dinner and shared that information. I was hit with the importance of taking on this responsibility. She was communicating something for her daughter, that this was designed to give her a means for dealing with the pain and loss. “We took it incredibly seriously, what we were given and how important this was going to be. Audrey wrote this message dealing with such deep issues, but she wrote it with humour and joy.” Over the Moon is about a young Chinese girl named Fei Fei who, in memory of her late mother, builds her own rocket ship to travel to the moon to prove the existence of the legendary Moon Goddess Chang’e. (In Chinese mythology, Chang’e drank an immortal elixir which sent her to the moon to be forever separated from her husband.) All you need to know about legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki “This was like a visual poem. You don’t talk about things like death and loss in intellectual ways. You do it visually. You create a world that has a symbol of the chamber of exquisite sadness and that is the place that Fei Fei has to go to. “These are the things she planted in the story that allows it to touch children in the way I think it is going to.” It would have been more timely to release the movie over Mid-Autumn Festival earlier this month – it will start streaming on Netflix from October 23 – but the underlying theme of loss and acceptance is timeless. Fei Fei’s grief and conflicted feelings come across more like a personal message from Wells to her husband and young daughter. In the movie, Fei Fei feels an affinity to the goddess as she misses her mother. The desire to escape increases from the unbearable possibility that dad might marry another woman. “I loved Fei Fei and I deeply connected with that character,” says Keane, who has worked on popular animations such as The Little Mermaid , Beauty and the Beast and Tarzan . “She was like so many characters I animated in my career. I love characters that believe the impossible is possible. Here is a 12-year-old girl who is going to build a rocket to fly to the dark side of the moon and meet a goddess that nobody believes exists. I so connected with all of this.” Tragedy touched Keane early this year, too. His last project was the Kobe Bryant short film, Dear Basketball , for which they both won Oscars in 2019. In January this year, the NBA superstar died in a helicopter crash . The all Asian vocal cast includes young stage star Cathy Ang (as Fei Fei), Tony Award winner Phillipa Soo ( Hamilton ) as the goddess Chang’e, John Cho, Ken Jeong, and Sandra Oh as Mrs Zhong, the would-be stepmother. Oh, the Killing Eve and Grey’s Anatomy star, didn’t mind her relatively small role as she wanted to collaborate with Wells once more. The two have worked together on three projects – the 1999 romance Guinevere that was Wells’ directorial debut; 2001’s The Princess Diaries , which Wells contributed to without credit; and 2003’s Under The Tuscan Sun , which Oh co-stars in and Wells wrote and directed. Tiny Indian superhero a mighty hit with young fans on Netflix “I remember my first Guinevere audition for her so clearly,” Oh says. “When she asked me to do Under The Tuscan Sun , we spent three months in Italy together making that film. “Just knowing her over the past 20 years, it’s a great privilege to have her as a collaborator. Knowing Audrey passed away during this film, the need to be a part of it and part of her legacy was really important to me. I’m really grateful to the producers for letting me do it.” Oh adds that it’s great to play a stepmother in an animation film who isn’t evil. “That’s a nice change,” she says. “Fei Fei doesn’t want her life to change and suddenly there’s this new woman and it’s very confusing. “She misses her mother but there’s this new family and she’s not sure she likes any of it. But her heart expands because she does confront a certain type of grief.” Netflix is still not available in China so it’s curious their first animation is set in the water town of Wuzhen, outside Hangzhou. It will also be interesting to see how agreeable Chinese viewers feel towards Chang’e as a glitzy K-pop dancing diva. For Keane, the son of Family Circle cartoonist Bill Keane, it was important to explain and justify the sensitivity he brought as a non-Asian to directing this film. “It was very important for me to recognise this story was not written as an American story being sold to an Asian audience,” he explains. “This was written as a story from China and interpreted so that it could be presented to the world. It’s very much a Chinese point of view. “Going to China was the most important thing to me. To spend time there, to eat in the homes of Chinese families, see the conditions and the relationships.” Three of the most stylish shows on Netflix He says it was very important that the producer is a Chinese woman and that the production worked very hard to build a team of Chinese artists from Shanghai and Vancouver. “We tried to get as many female animators as we could, and particularly Asian, that could relate to Fei Fei and Chang’e, as well as understand the culture,” says Keane. “I learned so much from them, I refer to it as a reverse mentorship. And I felt I needed that. You have to direct with an openness to learn.”