“Boys Go to Jupiter” is coming back to Los Angeles. And we’ve got an exclusive clip.
Julian Glander’s one-of-a-kind animated feature, which follows suburban Florida youth Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett) and his quest to quickly make $5000 by becoming a courier for a food delivery app, will play at Vidiots this weekend. And we have an exclusive clip to celebrate. Watch it below and read our chat with Glander, a visual artist, videogame designer and animator, about his wonderfully weird debut film.
Glander said that he started thinking about the movie in 2019, when he was “running his mouth off” about how he could complete an animated feature in a year. (At the time he was also saying that he could “make short films faster than anyone.”) He wrote the script for “Boys Go to Jupiter” and teamed with producer Peisin Yang Lazo, who Glander said “did about 500 jobs on the movie, putting everything together with the cast and figuring out all the really jumbly admin and legal stuff that I’ve never touched before on any project. Stepping into this world of agents and managers was probably harder than making the movie itself.”
“Boys Go to Jupiter” has an all-star voice cast of some of the most exciting voices in independent comedy and film, including Janeane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Joe Pera, Sarah Sherman, Cole Escola, Eva Victor and Demi Adejuyigbe.
“I basically brought these people a script and said, ‘Hey, I pinky-promise this isn’t going to be a waste of your time.’ I think if the cast hadn’t showed up and given such great performances, it would have been very easy to walk away from it at that point,” said Glander. He presented the performers with the script, some visuals and a :30 second trailer. They all signed on.
And Glander’s approach to making the movie was just as idiosyncratic as the final product wound up being. “What if you could make an animated movie, not in the pipeline style, not where story outline comes first and then thumbnails and then roughs and then boards and each person hands it off as it makes its way down pipeline?” Glander wondered. “What if you could make a movie more like a novel, where you’re chipping away at every single part of it at the same time until it’s done?”
He said that it took him about three years to write the script, working on it in secret at night (Glander’s wife didn’t even know what he was up to). They recorded with the cast right before the actor’s strike, recording some actors in the morning, when the strike was set to begin that night at midnight. And there was a year of actual production.
When you watch the movie it doesn’t look like it should work – models threaten to break at every turn, characters are bent at unnatural angles and the entire world, part turn-of-the-millennium online art, part tilt-shifted miniaturization, feels uncanny, like something you should treasure.
“We were defying god at every turn,” Glander joked.
He continued: “What’s cool about animation is it’s technology and story dancing. It’s very low fidelity, inexpressive character, is what my little MacBook Pro can do. And so the challenge story-wise, was, What’s a story that makes sense for a world where everyone looks like a Sims or looks like a Playmobil character? That whirled its way towards this idea of working the gig economy and the way without our permission, but sometimes with our acceptance and our enthusiasm, our lives and our relationship with work has been rewritten over the last decade and turned us into little NPCs.”
Glander said that he has been touring the movie, first at film festivals around the country and now with the movie opening theatrically. “I think the reason that I can talk so candidly is because I’m feeling so good right now. I never thought that this movie was going to open in 45 theaters,” Glander said. “I understand that that’s a drop in the bucket, but to me, that’s like, the entire world.”
He said that he is currently writing the script for his second feature and has been taking meetings with various studios. “To do this again, I would love to do it a whole different way, so that it’s a new experience, because otherwise you can run the same play over and over again and you get diminishing returns,” Glander said.
“Boys Go to Jupiter” will be at Vidiots this weekend and is playing nationally now.
