Review: Rocket Club: Across the Cosmos is a kid-friendly intro to sci-fi

When the Academy announced this year's batch of Oscar-eligible animated features a couple weeks ago, one title caught my eye: Rocket Club: Across the Cosmos. It was the only movie on the list that I had never heard of, so of course, it became my quest to see it.

Mission accomplished.

In a year where a lot of my favorite animated movies are more adult-oriented, tackling mature themes and stories -- Memoir of a Snail, No Dogs or Italians Allowed, Art College 1994 -- it's fun to watch something that's anything but. Rocket Club: Across the Cosmos is aimed squarely at kids. It's bright, fun, and short (it clocks in at just over an hour), the perfect movie to pop on for the kids, and one that they'll likely want to start over again as soon as the credits roll.

From what I can gather, Rocket Club is a Canadian TV show, and this movie is a sort of stitched-together feature that takes you through a few of those episodes, setting the stage for further adventures. It definitely has that episodic feel to it. You can pretty much feel when one episode ends and the next starts, though this does a good job of making the transitions feel natural. There's some nice overlap that helps sell the illusion that this was always meant to be a feature. For anime fans, this sort of thing isn't unusual -- a lot of anime will release movies that condense a whole season, or just present some episodes on the big screen. No harm, no foul.

The premise is really cute. The Rocket Club is a group of kids -- Callie, Jeenie, Ravi, Callie's younger brother Chip, and robot TAC -- who secretly go on adventures in outer space during their summer vacation. They have the absolute coolest tree house that also serves as their mission control, and a ship with a "WUP drive" that Ravi is endlessly tinkering with and trying to get under control so the gang can venture to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and beyond.

This thing is just a joy to look at. It feels very much like a kid's idea of what sci-fi might be, what it should look like and feel like. There's a toy-like quality to the presentation of this world, right down to the bobble-head proportions of the characters. Everything is colorful and bright, with lots of rounded shapes and shiny surfaces. There are lots os nice textures -- the fur on various alien creatures, the slightly scuffed body of the spaceship, the rippling waves on a melting ice planet. All of the characters have fun, defining details, too. I particularly love Callie and Chip's big ol' cinnamon bun-looking hair, and the villainous Calvin's missing tooth.

Calvin deserves his own paragraph, because he is such a fun villain. He's also a kid, and apparently a really bright one, because he has a lot of tech at his disposal, and a plan to move the moon in front of the earth to cause a new ice age, which will then let him become ruler of the human race (?). His villainy boils down to his anger at not being in charge of Rocket Club, or in Rocket Club at all, and he honestly just cracked me up a lot throughout this. My favorite bit is when his grand scheme is being put into motion, and he sings a brief spoof of "That's Amore." Very good stuff.

This really is an ideal movie for kids. It's short, so they'll pretty easily sit through it. The episodic structure means there's always something new happening -- a game of gravity ball, a new alien planet being explored, a new cute creature appearing -- which is also a boon for short attention spans. And the way everything looks and sounds is appealing, fun, cool. When the WUP drive kicks in, everything gets technicolor and gelatinous, like a Willy Wonka tunnel crossed with a Star Wars jump to light speed. Per TAC, it "feels like calculus." It's a great effect.

For adults, too, it's an easy breezy watch. Both for the reasons mentioned above, and for some of the humor that kids might not even notice. For instance, when it's time to suit up, the Rocket Club head into glass tubes where their suits are lasered on in very hi-tech fashion. TAC also goes through this process, even though nothing changes, since he's a robot and doesn't need a suit. A very solid bit that gets even better when he goes through it again to un-suit later, again, changing nothing. It got a good laugh out of me.

It seems that a whole season of the show has already aired, but this movie covers some of the episodes (and from what I can tell, not necessarily successive ones -- it's weirdly hard to find much info on the show online). So maybe this movie was made to help bring fans into the fold, to help garner interest before the next season, or next movie. Not entirely sure. But I do know that this journey Across the Cosmos was a lot of fun, and I hope to see these characters again.