It’s basically a 14-minute music video
Forget everything you think you know about "old movies." This isn't a three-hour slog through a silent desert. It’s a fast-paced, surreal sprint. Because it’s so short, it functions more like a YouTube short or a high-concept music video than a traditional feature. Critics give it a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes because it essentially invented the visual language we still use in every blockbuster today.
If your kid is used to the polished CGI of the modern era, the "stage play" aesthetic here might look dorky at first. Lean into that. Point out how the stars are literally people in costumes and the rocket is a giant metal bullet. It’s a great bridge for kids who are already into the Dragon Masters series or other high-fantasy stories where the "rules" of the world are a bit flexible and weird.
The "How did they do that?" factor
The most fun way to watch this is to treat it like a magic show. There are no computers here. Every time a Moon-man vanishes in a puff of smoke, that was a "stop-trick"—the filmmakers literally stopped the camera, moved the actor, and started it again.
If you have a kid who is constantly asking how things work, this is a better teaching tool than a thousand-page textbook. You can even pair it with a book like Light Is All Around Us to talk about how light and shadows work on a film set versus how they work in actual space. It’s a visual lesson in how humans used to imagine the impossible before we actually had the technology to get there.
Making it an event
Since there’s no dialogue, this is a social watch. You shouldn't just drop them in front of the TV and walk away. Narrate it. Make up voices for the astronomers. If you've got a space-obsessed kid who already has a list of the best space movies for kids on rotation, this is the ultimate "where it all started" entry.
If they get hyped on the lunar exploration vibe but need something more interactive afterward, check out Escape from the Moon. It carries that same "stranded on a rock" energy but lets them make the tactical decisions the professors in the movie probably should have made before they started hitting aliens with umbrellas.
One last tip: try to find the hand-colored version. It was painted frame-by-frame over a century ago, and the colors have a vibrating, hallucinogenic quality that makes the whole experience feel much more modern and intentional than a grainy black-and-white clip.
