Boys Go to Jupiter, an animated feature directed and written by Pittsburgh-based 3D artist Julian Glander, is truly a product of its time. And that time is now. As the press notes mention: “[The film] was self-produced and animated entirely over 90 days on the free open-source 3D modeling program Blender. Peisin Yang Lazo executive produced.” Running about 85 minutes and featuring an impossibly stellar voice cast (including Elsie Fisher, Julio Torres, Sarah Sherman, Joe Pera, Janeane Garofalo, Demi Adejuyigbe, Cole Escola, and Eva Victor, to name just a few), this film is often funny and sometimes introspective about this land of screens we find ourselves trapped inside. A bit long in the tooth at times, it is undeniably engaging and reliably weird.
Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett) is a teenager living in Florida and determined to gig work his way to five-thousand dollars. His main gig is delivering food for the DoorDash-like company Grubster (“Have a Grubby Day!”). He hangs out with his friends around an empty swimming pool and at local chain restaurants surrounded by empty construction spaces. Once Billy encounters a strange little alien named Donut, he becomes the target of the evil Dolphin Groves Juice Company. They are determined to gain possession of (so as to exploit) Donut, and are willing to pay Billy 5000 handsomely to hand him over. It becomes a moral dilemma for our hero: the money or your soul?
The animation style is a disturbed, colorful update of The Sims by way of Google Street View. This aesthetic is combined with screen-forward, late-stage capitalism themes of living on and in your phone, waiting for the right opportunity, and doing everything in your power to stay engaged and interested in a world that is increasingly less engaged and interested in you. Adejuyigbe’s voice performance as an online blob of financial advice named Mr. Moolah is particularly effective and disturbing. Garofalo is also great, but then when is she not?
Glander does well to create a laconic yet stressed-out space that plays original enough while also being disturbingly relatable. These characters may look fairly simple, but they are emotionally complex. At one point, Billy asks Gail 5000 (Eva Victor) what to do if he’s not as smart as he thinks. She tells him that “you wouldn’t be allowed to be so off-putting.” Bone-dry comedy pushes the narrative through its short yet somewhat stretched runtime. At a crucial point in the film, a character puts it bluntly: “Not doing anything is still a decision.” Boys Go to Jupiter is deceptively straightforward, despite all of the tangents and side characters. This movie is about finding purpose in an increasingly purposeless place. And that is plenty for a movie to be about, to be sure. Ultimately, do we care enough about these characters to find purpose in the movie itself? We should, the characters are us.
Boys Go to Jupiter opens on August 8.