In Over The Moon, does Fei Fei really fly to the moon in her homemade rocket ship or is it all just a dream? Netflix’s 2020 animated musical Over The Moon is a co-production between the streamer’s animation arm, China’s Pearl Studio and Sony Pictures Imageworks that boasts Disney alum Glen Keane in the director’s chair making his feature-length debut. Keane directs from a script penned by the late Audrey Wells that’s rich in references to Chinese mythology and traditions and is brought to life by an all-star Asian American voice cast.
The protagonist of Over The Moon is Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) – a young girl who is finding it hard to cope with the death of her mother (Ruthie Ann Miles) four years earlier and struggles when her father (played by John Cho) gets engaged to Mrs. Zhong (Sandra Oh), mother to Fei Fei’s bratty would-be step-brother Chin (Robert G. Chiu). When Fei Fei was younger, her mother told her the legend of Chang’e – a mortal woman who took an immortality potion and became the goddess of the moon, leaving behind her soulmate Houyi who she still waits for. This instilled a belief in Fei Fei that love is everlasting, and she thinks if she can prove the legend is real her father will remember how much he loved her mother.
To that end, the scientifically-minded Fei Fei builds a homemade rocket and travels to the moon, inadvertently taking Chin along. After they crash on the moon, Fei Fei discovers Chang’e (Phillipa Soo) is real and presides over a kingdom called Lunaria. However, Chang’e isn’t who Fei Fei expected and she’s soon sent on a mission to find a gift for the moon goddess that will supposedly reunite Chang’e with her long-lost love Houyi (Conrad Ricamora). With the help of the colorful characters that inhabit Lunaria, Fei Fei completes her quest but the real message of the movie is how it prompts both its protagonist and Chang’e to deal with the grief of losing loved ones so that they can move forward and grow.
At the end of Over The Moon, Fei Fei and Chin return home and she’s later seen enjoying being a part of her new family unit. However, one big question remains when the Over The Moon credits roll and that’s whether Fei Fei actually traveled to the moon or if it was all the allegorical dream of a young girl coming to terms with her grief. According to an interview with Insider, director Glen Keane referred to Fei Fei’s journey in the well-reviewed Over The Moon as a dream but ultimately believes it’s up to audiences to decide the truth.
That said, in the same Insider interview, Keane noted that he’d asked Over The Moon screenwriter Audrey Wells (who died after a long battle with cancer while the movie was in production) what her thoughts on the matter were. According to Wells, Fei Fei’s journey to the moon to find Chang’e is completely real and not a product of the protagonist’s imagination. Considering that Wells wrote the script for the Netflix animation as a sort-of love letter to her husband and daughter before she died, her more heart-warming interpretation of Over The Moon and Fei Fei’s journey is the one viewers should probably take as the definitive narrative.