Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | August 21, 2025
An ASMR escape from the here and now swathed in Trapper Keeper colors and a Y2K soundscape, writer-director Julian Glander’s animated fantasia Boys Go To Jupiter is a sweet fable about the gig economy that somehow manages to never stumble into despair, despite that subject matter’s triggering effect on the very millennials this nostalgia machine was created in a lab for. Featuring an alt-star cast of voices including Julio Torres, Tavi Gevinson, Elsie Fisher, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Sherman, and Cole Escola, Boys Go To Jupiter is the ambient sound of lapping waves and birdsong in the Ecco the Dolphin video games turned cinema. Inexplicable but also just right.
As the saying goes, “Girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” And Glander’s film is full of stupid boys making stupid decisions, stumbling through life with their hearts on their sleeves and an uncannily Postal-Service-esque track tinkling in the background. An under-the-radar musical—featuring several wonderfully spacey tracks penned by Glander himself—the movie follows the daily travails of Billy 5000 (voiced by Jack Corbett aka “the Planet Money TikTok guy” which… quite frankly means nothing to me) as he hustles his way through the app-based food-delivery industry during one Floridian Christmas season.
Billy (whose high school nickname was “The Human Calculator”) believes he’s found a way to manipulate his employer Grubster’s algorithms so he can earn ten times what he’s supposed to be earning with each delivery he makes. So he sets off on a quest trying to milk as much money as humanly possible before they catch on to his scheme. Hopping onto his hoverboard, Billy drifts back and forth, back and forth, through the cross-hatched streets of his day-glo hometown—Glander’s gloriously singular animation style has the feel at times of a side-scrolling video-game. We rarely see characters in close-up, instead framed by a vast expanse of their surroundings—this is a suburban hallucination of sky-high side-of-the-road hot dog stands and convenience store parking lots; many a miniature golf dinosaur dotting the landscape shall come to pass.
Dinos aside during his cross-town journeys Billy will meet up with many an odd character—there are his old pals Freckles (Grace Kuhlenschmidt), Beatbox (Elsie Fisher), and Peanut (J.R. Phillips), who all feel a little left behind by Billy’s working-man responsibilities, but not enough to stop locking one another in port-a-potties. There’s a confused elderly man called Old Slippy (Cole Escola) who nurses a farm of chickens who squawk and sit on golf balls. There’s the possible love-interest Rosario Dolphin (Miya Folick) who works in the laboratory of her juicing-empire robot-mother Dr. Dolphin (Janeane Garofolo) while creating experimental fruit mutations. You know—the same crowd you see in any small town, really.
If you’re searching for an anchor here Jupiter’s surreal millennial doldrums all feel very much in line with Julio Torres’ work—in the series’ Les Espookys and Fantasmas and of course his brilliantly funny and strange 2023 film Problemista—so it’s no surprise here when Torres shows up to voice not one not two but three different characters. There are these long slow pans across piles of beautiful garbage in the NYC of Problemista that perfectly mirror Glander’s vision of Florida, and both creators use their whimsy and flights of fabulous imagination as cudgels, to fight off too much negativity from trickling in. In Torres’ hands a fire-breathing Tilda Swinton becomes an actual dragon to playfully vanquish, while Glander turns an alien invasion into an intergalactic spaghetti party. Complete with song!
What anyone above the age of, well me, might make of any of this I have no idea—my youngest-rung-of-Gen-X ass probably missed a pile of its allusions. And yet it’s all so comforting, so tranquil, so beautiful to behold, that I don’t think even the most confounded viewer would mind wading into Boys Go To Jupiter and letting its wonderful weirdnesses just wash over them. One of its most inexplicable songs has been stuck in my head for two full months now—grant me a world where a space-worm singing the praises of styrofoam containers makes its way to the Oscar stage and I’ll be willing to forgive at least a few of 2025’s milder transgressions in exchange. I, like Billy, dare to dream.
