Julian Glander didn’t have a feature in mind when he started “Boys Go to Jupiter.”
“I grew up loving animation. I think every child does, and I always felt like it was very special to me. And I made flip books as a kid, and then I went to college for communications and specifically to work in advertising. And so I started my career as an advertising junior copywriter,” says the director and writer.
“Found myself in New York, in the world of people doing illustration, and I think, I see my career kind of making these steps up as the internet kind of evolved, where I started doing illustrations, and then it was animated GIFs, and then there was the bandwidth for one- minute videos, and then two- or three-minute shorts that went to festivals, and then a 10- minute TV episode. And after that 10-minute TV episode, I thought, let me just do that nine times in a row. That was my delusion that that was how making a feature was going to work, right?”
Cartuna and Irony Point have acquired the North American distribution rights to “Boys Go to Jupiter,” which bowed at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival. Cartuna and Irony Point released film Aug. 8 at New Your City’s IFC Center, and that will be followed by an Aug. 15 bow at the Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles and then rollout nationally.
Set in a Florida coastal town, “Boys Go to Jupiter” follows 16-year-old Billy 5000 (voiced by (Jack Corbett), a math prodigy and high school dropout hustling tirelessly for the big bucks American dream as a food delivery guy for Grubster. There are friendly alien creatures who live in the Earth’s core, Billy’s older sister and friends, and a ruthless orange juice magnate.
Variety critic Carlos Aguilar said in his review: “Inherently unexpected in the landscape of American independent film, Julian Glander’s idiosyncratic delight is the rare animated feature made outside of this country’s major studios. With his hilariously offbeat, uniquely stylized and surreptitiously profound debut, Glander joins a small but notable list of directors daring enough to try their hand at indie animation in the U.S., joining the ranks of Bill Plympton, Dash Shaw and Don Hertzfeldt.” It was also named a Variety Critics’ Pick.
It’s also a sly commentary on the ravages of capitalism wrapped up in pastel-colored animation, voiced by actors such as Elsie Fisher, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, Julio Torres, Janeane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Sarah Sherman and Joe Pera and singer-songwriter Miya Folick and writer-director Eva Vitcor.
“I think certainly that anyone who sees that list of cast names probably knows if they want to see this movie or not,” says Glander. “Julio is, I mean, he’s truly brilliant. We had worked together on kids’ book before this, so we had some rapport, and he has such a special mind and a special way of seeing the world that, well, I can just gush all day. The whole cast is people like that who I really admired and really connected with their work, and I kind of hoped that they would connect with the script too.”
Glander says the idea for the movie came about during the pandemic, when he became interested in delivery drivers “as people. … There was a moment where we were starting to understand that the people driving trucks and cars all day all around us were actually the only people making anything happen, and that our entire society depended on them. And there was a moment where it felt like we were going to really recognize these essential workers. And then it sort of slipped away, back to all of us not looking at each other anymore,” he says.
Glander says he thought there was a lot of comic potential in the new rituals everyone was developing for ordering food and having it delivered — “contactless delivery or our super specific delivery orders.” But he saw the life of a driver as a “bucket that I could fit a lot of other ideas into.”
Yet he didn’t think it was a feature, just ideas being slung back and forth with his producer. “What if I wrote a script, and then, I guess, what if we tried to get some people to act in it? And I when Julio and Elsie Fisher and Joe Pera jumped into it, they were the first people I messaged about it, then it was like, Oh, I think we have a ball rolling here. And I think if we record these people, I’m going to have to see this all the way through and honor the work that they did for me.”
The film, which is also peppered with musical numbers written by Glander, looks deceptively simple, with the Florida landscape is awash in 1980s pastels.
“As someone who spent my teenage years in Florida and hasn’t gone back, it’s easier to keep building it up in my mind as an even more magical place than it was,” says Glander. “I grew up in Land o’ Lakes, where they made ‘Edward Scissorhands,’ and those houses are still there. They painted them pastel for the for the movie shoot, which is awesome. And the so the people who bought the houses had the option to keep them or paint them beige, and everyone painted them beige. One thing that’s happening in ‘Edward Scissorhands’ is they are talking about the decay of this sort of fantastical pastel 1950s and that’s, to me, that’s what Florida represents, is this sort of like this magic that’s begun to rot.”
He adds, “This idea that we built this very planned utopian society around Disney World and air conditioning and these new big cars that we had, and then no one took care of it for so long. And what happens when all that stuff sort of starts to accumulate grime and dust, and so that’s that was sort of what was in my mind when I was building the backgrounds.”
The characters almost resemble Playmobil figures but are subtly animated, and can be funny, and even heartbreaking.
“I really have always been drawn to animation, specifically classic stop-motion like Gumby and Rankin-Bass and I looked at all the ‘Peanuts’ specials a lot. And I think what I really liked about all that stuff is it feels very honest. You can really see how it was made. And a lot of times people talk about animation as a magical art form that is trying to trick you, but I actually am most inspired when it’s the opposite of that. Aardman is a great example, where sometimes it’s just two circles talking to each other. And that’s that is actually what it feels like sometimes to talk to someone is that you’re like two little perfect shapes.”
