I’m not one for zeitgeist surfing, but surely it says something that this summer has seen two computer-animated movies about non-human astronauts. First we got Space Chimps, and now there’s Fly Me to the Moon, which recounts the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing with the ostensibly delightful added detail that a trio of enterprising adolescent houseflies made it on board.

Speaking of ostensibly delightful details, Fly Me to the Moon is being advertised as the first animated feature produced exclusively for 3-D. Director Ben Stassen is considered a titan of the pop-up format and the 3-D imagery is indeed vivid, but the characterizations are barely two-dimensional. There’s the wide-eyed dreamer fly (voiced by Trevor Gagnon), his two buddies (one’s a geek, one’s pudgy), his tall-tale-telling grandfather (Christopher Lloyd) and his fainting-spell-prone mom (Kelly Ripa).

The impressive visual details (NASA gave the filmmakers access to the original Apollo 11 blueprints) don’t redeem the predictable storytelling: the stowaways make it on board by the skin of their thoraxes and they end up helping the oblivious crew members (including Buzz Aldrin in a sub-Simpsons cameo as himself); our hero takes one giant step for pest-kind; the soundtrack cues up Stravinsky’s 2001 waltz. The only unexpected note is struck by Aldrin, in an odd direct-address, live-action epilogue in which the second man on the moon assures us that the events depicted in the film could never have happened: it is, ahem, quite a Buzz-kill.