Not going to lie, it takes a little while to get accustomed to the look of "Boys Go to Jupiter." Made entirely on the free, open-source 3D modeling program Blender, this animated coming-of-age comedy is a DIY operation and labor of love from writer-director Julian Glander. As you've probably surmised from the lengthy closing credits of any given Pixar film, it typically takes thousands of animators and tens of millions of dollars to put one of these things onscreen. Glander and his producer Peisin Yang Lazo spent four years working with what the director has described as "a microscopic budget" while wearing hundreds of hats to pull the picture together.
The result is a defiantly rudimentary aesthetic, with prefab backgrounds and perfectly round, toy-like character faces that seem to be borrowed from the Fisher-Price Little People that my youngest niece is currently obsessed with. "Boys Go to Jupiter" might resemble a clunky, retro video game from decades ago, but I'll be damned if that look doesn't start to grow on you. The flatness of the onscreen spaces matches the characters' deadpan lack of affect, conjuring a torpid sort of vacation-mode miasma that becomes beguiling. By the end, you can't imagine the movie looking any other way.
Set not on the planet Jupiter, but rather in Florida (which feels like it can be just as strange and distant sometimes), the film follows a mischievous crew of kids killing time during the holiday dead zone between Christmas and New Year's Eve. The rambunctious youngsters make up silly songs about their food and play pranks like locking each other in porta-potties for "toilet time." But 16-year-old Billy (voiced by Jack Corbett of NPR's Planet Money) has grown tired of such antics. He's a bored math prodigy who recently dropped out of high school, delivering food for a DoorDash-type takeout app called Grubster because he thinks he can make a fortune gaming the exchange rates if he's paid in Danish kroner. He zips around the movie on a hoverboard scooter, aching for his life to start but unsure of how to get it going.
Billy -- nicknamed Billy 5000 by his friends for his oft-stated goal of amassing $5,000 before New Year's Eve -- is still carrying a torch for his childhood crush Rosario Dolphin (Miya Folick), who these days would rather be called Rozebud. She's the daughter of the scientist behind a local citrus empire, whose fruit processing plant seems to be the only viable industry in town. Voiced by Janeane Garofalo with her trademark disappointment, orange expert Dr. Dolphin is rumored to be descended from an actual sea mammal/human hybrid, but only the younger kids believe that story. She's one of the only adult characters in the movie, which otherwise seems to take place in the same parentless limbo as "Peanuts" cartoons and "Our Gang" shorts.
It's fitting that Gen X goddess Garofalo is playing the elder to a voice cast packed with current alt-comedy superstars and up-and-coming cool kids, including Julio Torres, Joe Pera, Demi Adejuyigbe, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, Sarah Sherman and "Sorry, Baby" writer-director Eva Victor. These characters may be going nowhere, but along the way, they stop for wonderfully random visits to places like the world's largest hot dog stand and a dinosaur-themed miniature golf course called Cretaceous Holes.
Oh, and there's also an alien. Actually, a whole family of them, and they're not from outer space, but rather from 10,000 feet below the Earth's surface. These jellyfish-like creatures vacation in Florida every year because mom (Tavi Gevinson) is a social media influencer who makes popular video reviews of Earthly snack foods and energy drinks. (They're really rather charming. I would subscribe.)
Taking its title from the old schoolyard taunt, "Girls go to college to get more knowledge/ Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider," the movie is a loose collection of oddball encounters and silly non sequiturs that hangs together more as a mood than a story. But it's an evocative mood that's stuck with me for days since seeing the picture. A melancholy undercurrent runs beneath all this poker-faced silliness, almost like Glander has made a Jim Jarmusch movie for little kids.
It's through the funny, dead-on details -- whether Rozebud's recommending books she hasn't read, or the bad advice flowing from Adejuyigbe's "Mr. Moolah" grindset podcast -- that we see how Billy 5000 is uncertain of what he wants from the world, and even less sure if he wants what it seems to be offering. He looks with exasperation and a little longing at the childish antics of his younger friends, as "Boys Go to Jupiter" reminds us of a time in your life when doing nothing felt like more than enough.