Maybe the key to creating an ideal coming-of-age film in 2025 is making all the pieces seem like it’s occurring in a cellular sport. As early adolescence turns into an more and more on-line expertise — positive, youngsters nonetheless play sports activities and go outdoors, however the form 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 out a guardian in sight — it helps to fulfill dejected kids on their very own hyper-colorful, overstimulating stage.
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 Occasions to The New Yorker and quick movies for 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 like a cool YouTube video your pal would have despatched you throughout the early Obama years, after 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, they usually have actual issues.
Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), an totally common 16-year-old 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 Yr’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 way of an app known as Grubster (which boasts the catchy slogan “Have a Grubby Day”).
The cash isn’t nice on paper, however he’s discovered a loophole: the app pays him in factors that have to be transformed to a foreign money of his alternative. By selecting to be paid in Czech Koruna and benefiting from an app glitch that converts it to Swedish Krona as a substitute, he’s capable of pocket $7 for each $1 he earns.
As he meanders round city performing unusual requests for suggestions and beatboxing together with his wealthier mates who don’t perceive why he’s so centered on cash, he encounters an ensemble of endearing prospects who mirror the whimsy of a storybook city regardless of their fashionable 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 music about how he doesn’t thoughts operating errands, probably the greatest 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 unintended alien kidnapping pressure him to confront his morals and decide how far he’s keen to go to make a buck (or 5000).
“Boys Go to Jupiter” is without doubt one of the freshest movies of 2025, brilliantly juxtaposing the infinite artistic alternatives afforded to us by digital artwork with the anxiousness of a technology that always 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 glad 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 seek out traction in, however right here’s hoping “Boys Go to Jupiter” launches the movie profession of an artist who graces us together with his whimsy for many years to return.
Grade: B+
A Cartuna and Irony Level launch, “Boys Go to Jupiter” is now taking part in in choose theaters.
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