Maybe the key to creating an amazing coming-of-age film in 2025 is making every thing seem like it’s occurring in a cellular recreation. As early adolescence turns into an more and more on-line expertise — positive, youngsters nonetheless play sports activities and go outdoors, however the sort of unsupervised exploration captured in movies like “Stand by Me” is now way more more likely to occur in open world video games than on bikes with no mum or dad in sight — it helps to fulfill dejected kids on their very own hyper-colorful, overstimulating degree.
Not that Julian Glander’s pleasant debut characteristic “Boys Go to Jupiter” ever acknowledges its digital sheen. The 3D animator, who branches out into filmmaking after a profession spent making graphics for everybody from The New York Instances to Grownup Swim, immerses us in a world that seems to be constructed out of digital Play-Doh, with candy-colored blobs forming a whimsical backdrop for characters with endearingly easy faces who run round discussing scorching canine philosophy, magical sentient lemons, and whether or not the faulty golf balls from an area miniature golf course are literally eggs.
It appears to be like like a cool YouTube video your pal would have despatched you throughout the early Obama years, once we have been all collectively discovering the then-fresh aesthetic of web weirdness and no one felt the necessity to cynically analyze anybody else’s intentions for posting such silliness. However there’s no escapism to be discovered for its characters. That is their actual world, and so they have actual issues.
Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), an completely common early-twentysomething who simply occurs to have a reputation match for a robotic, is on a mission. It’s the day after Christmas, and he desperately must make $5,000 by New 12 months’s Eve. His media weight loss plan of grindset podcasts and hustle tradition movies have satisfied him to focus his efforts on delivering meals by means of an app referred to as Grubster (which boasts the catchy slogan “Have a Grubby Day”).
The cash is just not nice on paper, however he’s discovered a loophole: the app pays him in factors that have to be transformed to a forex of his selection. By selecting to be paid in Czech Koruna and profiting from an app glitch that converts it to Swedish Krona as an alternative, he’s in a position to pocket $7 for each $1 he earns.
As he meanders round city performing unusual requests for ideas and beatboxing along with his wealthier associates who don’t perceive why he’s so centered on cash, he encounters an ensemble of endearing clients who replicate the whimsy of a storybook city regardless of their trendy choice for ordering meals on their telephones and having it left at their doorways.
It’s not the worst option to spend your days — as Billy 5000 expresses in a track about how he doesn’t thoughts working errands, the most effective musical interludes in a movie stuffed with them — however issues take a extra existential flip when an encounter with the evil matriarch of a juice firm and an unintentional alien kidnapping power him to confront his morals and decide how far he’s prepared to go to make a buck (or 5000).
“Boys Go to Jupiter” is among the freshest movies of 2025, brilliantly juxtaposing the limitless artistic alternatives afforded to us by digital artwork with the nervousness of a technology that usually appears like its personal real-world alternatives have gotten fewer and additional between. Glander fills his world with “BoJack Horseman” ranges of joke density whereas creating an aesthetic all his personal. He’s completely happy to take pleasure in subtitled songs sung in alien languages about quick meals, however manages to stroll the ever-so-delicate line of being bizarre with out succumbing to the dreaded “bizarre for the sake of being random.”
Indie animation stays one of many hardest niches to search out traction in, however right here’s hoping “Boys Go to Jupiter” launches the movie profession of an artist who graces us along with his whimsy for many years to come back.
Grade: B+
A Cartuna launch, “Boys Go to Jupiter” is now taking part in in choose theaters.
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