Crafted Chaos With a Beating Heart

Read Time:5 Minute, 49 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Boys Go to Jupiter
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Genre: Comedy, Animation
Year Released: 2024, 2025
Runtime: 1h 30m
Director(s): Julian Glander
Writer(s): Julian Glander
Cast: Jack Corbett, Miya Folick, Janeane Garofalo, Elsie Fisher, Tavi Gevinson, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, Julio Torres, Joe Pera, Sarah Sherman, Cole Escola
Where to Watch: opening in New York on August 8, 2025, and Los Angeles on August 15

RAVING REVIEW: BOYS GO TO JUPITER plays like a backyard musical staged inside a 3D diorama—bright, elastic, and oddly tender. A day in suburban Florida is an inspired starting point: the calendar feels stalled, the air hangs heavy, and the future refuses to announce itself. That’s where Billy 5000 lives—between errands on a delivery app and a self-imposed deadline to scrape together five grand before New Year’s. Money is the plot device, but the movie’s real currency is attention: to textures, to small talk, to loneliness that looks like boredom until it doesn’t.

Julian Glander’s world looks like someone sculpted the internet out of marshmallows. It’s a deliberate aesthetic choice that serves two purposes simultaneously. First, it disarms. The squishy, candy-shell surfaces make everything approachable, even when the story tilts toward menace or melancholy. Second, it clarifies. With the noise of “realism” turned down, the film foregrounds behavior—the way teens loiter, improvise, hustle, and sometimes stall out. That balance gives the comedy room to breathe without sanding off the edges of what the film is actually about: the shrinking space between being a kid with time to waste and a worker whose time is already spoken for.

As Billy zigzags through town, deliveries turn into miniature character studies. The movie’s episodic backbone is a feature, not a flaw—each stop is a window into a different flavor of American coping mechanism. There’s the juice magnate who has converted wellness into a corporate religion, and peers who perform confidence like a side gig. The arrival of Donut, the not-from-here hitchhiker, pushes the story into surreal adventure territory, but it also sharpens the metaphor. Caring for something fragile and inexplicable becomes Billy’s first truly adult task, and the most quietly moving passages are the ones where caretaking wins out over making quota.

Animation is more than a look here; the movement has a toy-box elasticity that sells gags, but the film is careful with physical business—the weight of a backpack, the slump of a kid at sunset, the urgency of a late delivery. The musical interludes also fit that world. Songs drift in like passing station IDs from a teenage radio of the mind: fuzzy hooks, diary-like lyrics, and a mood that toggles between shrugged-off humor and unfulfilled yearning. It’s the rare “musical” where numbers don’t pause the story so much as let it peek out from behind the jokes.

The voice ensemble is a killer collage of contemporary comedy and indie pop sensibilities. Jack Corbett’s Billy is unforced and present; there’s no hard sell to his frustration, which makes the character easy to root for even when he’s skirting responsibility. Miya Folick’s Rozebud brings a soft pull—romantic interest as a reminder that desire and direction aren’t the same thing. Janeane Garofalo’s Dr. Dolphin leans into the satire without going too broad; the role works because the performance trusts the world’s logic. And the bench runs deep: Elsie Fisher, Tavi Gevinson, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, Julio Torres, Joe Pera, Sarah Sherman, Cole Escola—each cameo is tuned like a pedal on a board, pressed just long enough to color a scene before lifting.

Underneath the jokes and neon palettes is a surprisingly clean structure about choices. Billy’s $5,000 quest is the spine, but the film keeps slipping in questions that don’t fit neatly on a to-do list: What do you owe friends who aren’t moving at your speed? Is a crush motivation or a distraction? When is a job a ladder, and when is it a maze? The movie thrives in that uncertainty, honoring the stasis of late December without letting it devolve into narrative mush. When the final movement arrives, the decisions feel proportionate to a kid’s world: no lectures, just the first grown-up trade-offs made in good faith.

The handmade feel is not a gimmick; it’s the point. The movie argues that craft scales: a small, idiosyncratic operation can hold a whole adolescence if the details are chosen with care. That care is everywhere—from the way storefronts echo the people inside them to the way the background gags hum in low gear so character beats can stay foregrounded. Even the Florida setting, rendered as a composite of suburban sprawl and roadside companion, does double duty: it’s specific enough to feel lived-in and elastic enough to read as Anywhere, USA.

What lingers isn’t a single set piece or one perfect joke; it’s the sensation of a world nudging a kid to pick a direction, and the small, stubborn acts of kindness that make that choice less lonely. BOYS GO TO JUPITER is playful, scrappy, and unusually generous—a coming-of-age story that believes growth isn’t something you perform for the timeline but something you cobble together between obligations. The film may be decked in pastels, but the emotions aren’t pastel at all. They’re saturated, a little weird, and exactly right for a holiday week when the year hasn’t ended yet and somehow has already started.

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[photo courtesy of GLANDERCO, CARTUNA, IRONY POINT]

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