Julian Glander’s feature-length debut, Boys Go to Jupiter, isn’t just an animated movie; it’s a digital fever dream soaked in existential dread and cheap Florida sunshine. If you took the visual palette of a forgotten ’90s educational CD-ROM, injected it with enough absurdist sketch comedy to stun a horse, and then dropped the whole mess into a scathing critique of hustle culture, you’d be halfway to understanding this singular, glorious piece of independent animation. This is what Adult Swim should be fighting for.
Forget Pixar’s photorealistic clouds—Glander, the mind behind the cult hit game ART SQOOL, weaponizes the low-poly aesthetic of Blender. The world of suburban Florida is rendered in blocky, plasticky, primary colors that simultaneously feel sterile and aggressively tactile. Characters look like Fisher-Price rejects or knock-off toys from an 8-bit past, all smooth surfaces and unsettlingly small facial features.
This is not a budget limitation; it’s a brilliant stylistic choice. It creates an immediate, unnerving distance from reality, making it the perfect canvas for the film’s plot: high school dropout Billy 5000 (voiced perfectly by NPR’s Jack Corbett) is grinding out deliveries for the terrifyingly cheerful app, “Grubster!” (Remember to “Have a Grubby Day!”). The visual noise perfectly mirrors the brain-fogged grind of the gig economy.
If the plot—Billy trying to hustle $5,000 before New Year’s Eve, stealing an experimental fruit, and finding a gelatinous, donut-shaped alien named Donut—wasn’t enough to hook you, the voice cast should be. This isn’t just a voice cast; it’s a comedian cult leader summit.
We’re talking Janeane Garofalo as the sinister Dr. Dolphin, CEO of the Dolphin Groves Juice Company (who is, incidentally, the daughter of a mutant NASA dolphin, because why not?). We get scene-stealers like Julio Torres (naturally), Sarah Sherman (bringing the appropriate chaos), Cole Escola, and Joe Pera as a lumpy-faced, BLT-loving mini-golf proprietor. Each secondary character is a micro-sketch of American oddity, a perfectly formed little bit of stand-up comedy given animated form.
What elevates Boys Go to Jupiter beyond a collection of animated shorts is the surprising amount of heart and the commitment to its themes. Amidst the existential bleakness of Billy’s grind—he literally says, “Sleep is for rich people”—the movie introduces lo-fi musical numbers that feel ripped from a Flight of the Conchords reject bin. These original songs, composed by Glander, are bizarrely catchy earworms about everything from side-hustles to the alien’s favorite trash foods.
The climax, which pits Billy’s quest for quick cash against his unexpected bond with Donut and the alien’s surprisingly spiritual connection to the “angels” (who are fruit-growing entities, naturally), lands with a moral weight that you definitely don’t see coming. It asks the big question: In a world where every relationship is transactional and every orange has been hyper-optimized for shipping, is escaping the system even possible, or do you just find a nice, weird cave to live in with your intergalactic family?
Ultimately, Boys Go to Jupiter is a triumph of DIY animation and a necessary shot in the arm for adult comedy. It’s strange, it’s beautiful, and it completely rejects the sterile corporate feel of major studio animation. Go watch this right now, or Billy 5000 will be “grubbing” your spot.