Of all the animated movies released this past year, there was really nothing like “Boys Go to Jupiter.”
Written and directed by Julian Glander, a video-game designer and artist, the film follows a Florida teen named Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett) who’s on a quest to make $5,000 so he can move out of his sister’s home. He works for a food-delivery service called Grubster and encounters various eccentric characters.
The movie is animated by Glander and a small team in a distinctly minimalist style, with a look that is somewhere between an early RPG video game and a turn-of-the-century screensaver. (The characters occasionally move and talk in a way that makes you feel like they might break at any moment.) It has the hippest voice cast of any 2025 animated movie, with Tavi Gevinson, Julio Torres, Elsie Fisher, Sarah Sherman, Cole Escola, Eva Victor and Demi Adejuyigbe all giving lovable, lived-in performances.
In a landscape dominated by slick commercial animation, “Boys Go to Jupiter” is the charming outsider that shows just how unlimited the potential of animation really is. Glander is particularly fond of a musical number in which Grace Kuhlenschmidt’s character, Freckles, performs an oddball tune called “Egg Song.”
“Throughout the movie, we have these musical breaks,” Glander said. “Production-wise, they were left very open-ended until the very end. As I wrote the script, and even as we recorded, I didn’t know visually what they were going to be.”
He wanted to avoid the impression that he was just “executing on storyboards,” so he kept things flexible in the planning stages. That paid off. “What Grace did with ‘Egg Song’ was really different than how I wrote it,” said Glander, who thought the song should be reminiscent of Daniel Johnston before Kuhlenschmidt suggested that the character would be more into Machine Gun Kelly.
For the visuals, the filmmaker embraced the surrealism that musicals can afford.
“It’s one of the moments in the movie where you can go in and out of reality, and people accept it in a way that they can’t in a lot of other genre formats,” he said. “We can see things that are unreal and hear things that are unreal and know that it’s emotionally true, even if it’s not actually happening — where there are giant eggs flying around her and people shapeshifting.”
He calls the sequence a “fancy, three-minute Steven Spielberg one-shot where we move a lot and things come in and out of frame.” He created it in Blender, the same program used for last year’s Oscar-winning animated feature “Flow.” “The file was very heavy and it was making my computer really hot,” he said. “I really liked working on that dangerous edge of things where the fans on my MacBook are blowing so loud. Something about pushing the machine to its limits was very fun.”
This story first ran in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
