Dreamy, Beautiful but Meandering, Boys Go to Jupiter Is a Unique Curio

The first thing one can immediately say for Boys Go to Jupiter, the new avant-garde animated feature from 3D artist and animator Julian Glander, is that you’re distinctly unlikely to have seen anything quite like it before, unless you’re already familiar with other instances of Glander’s work. The multi-hyphenate has directed short film projects for Adult Swim, Disney, Cartoon Network and HBO Max, but Boys Go to Jupiter is a distinctly more ambitious feature debut, one in which you can feel the outreach of a young artist calling in all of their accumulated favors, roping in every like-minded creative he’s encountered in the space of a burgeoning career to make something that is special to him. The film is packed with notable comedic, filmic and musical individuals, but it’s Glander’s ethereally quirky visual stylings that are sure to first draw immediate attention. Handsomely odd and yet evocative of universal adolescent experiences, Boys Go to Jupiter trades in familiar coming-of-age sentiment, but looks like no other film you’ve ever seen in doing it.

This is thanks to the film’s unique 3D animation, which is rendered in a bubbly, plasticky-but-textured style that evokes the claymation of the likes of Aardman Animations, while allowing additional possibilities as Glander stages his various pastel-colored absurdist tableaus. The signature look often comes down to perspective: Although we see the characters of Boys Go to Jupiter from a wide variety of angles, the film frequently returns to an overhead isometric viewpoint, making us feel like we’re perched in a tree watching a gaggle of teens who are unaware they’re being observed. It can’t help but evoke videogame aesthetics, like a surreal slacker version of Fallout or Disco Elysium.

It also communicates the odd, surrealist and yet recognizably satirical world that Glander has cooked up, set in an alternate version of Florida, in a town dominated by a high-tech orange juice-producing mega company. It’s against that backdrop that we meet our protagonist Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), an earnest young slacker who has decided to reform himself as a proponent of hustle culture in the gig economy. Blessed with a savant-like natural gift for calculation and observation, his quest is to scam the fast food delivery service he works for, “Grubster,” via a currency exchange rate bug, in order to earn the $5,000 he’s decided he needs in order to show that he can afford his own place and become an independent, money-having adult individual. Along the way, he meets an alluring young free-spirited woman named “Rosario Dolphin,” aka Rozebud (Miya Folick), a mysterious underground creature he adopts and names Donut, and Rozebud’s mother Dr. Dolphin, the head of the juice conglomerate who is desperate to acquire the creature for herself.

This all makes Boys Go to Jupiter sound like a more conventional narrative than it really is, however–some distant cousin of the “kid makes a magical friend that the authority figures are hunting” genre, à la E.T., although somehow I get the sense that Glander would probably possess a bad movie lover’s fascination with Mac and Me instead. In truth, his film is a much more loose assembly, one that brushes up against those tropes but then allows them to simply flow on by without much commentary or interest. It’s less interested in “plotty” elements such as the creature’s hijinks or establishing a genuine antagonist, and more enraptured by the the ennui and longing of the teenage experience, capturing a moment in which “childish things” are being set aside by a character who has been forced to become a hustler out of necessity. Billy 5000 is deeper than he might appear, having secretly dropped out of high school in order to pursue his money-making goals. His deadbeat mother at one point orders pizza and has him deliver it, telling her unseen boyfriend that it was “just a delivery boy” at the door, seemingly not recognizing (or caring to acknowledge) her own son. Billy’s pain is palpable, and his drive toward “maturity” as he sees it is understandable, and we watch as it pushes him away from his friends, drifting toward his idea of self-sufficiency, a place where he likely reasons that people like his mother will no longer have any power over him.