A lo-fi, aesthetically pleasing, and surreal semi-musical about a teenage gig worker who encounters a donut-shaped alien in suburban Florida.

“Have a Grubby day!”

Welcome in Julian Glander’s wonderfully weird, neon-coloured world, where we meet Billy 5000, a high school dropout who was once dubbed “the human calculator”, but now tries to make it to $5,000 working for food delivery app Grubster. Along the way, Billy encounters a donut-shaped alien who’s being hunted by juice mogul Dr. Dolphin who grows mutated fruits from moon rocks. And what seems like a distant planet full of oddities, is actually just an alternate suburban Florida.

Was the pandemic good for something after all? The idea for this deadpan musical comedy about a teenage gig worker with a rise-and-grind mindset came to Glander when he spent a lot of time on Google Street View during the lockdown. He grew up in Tampa and zooming around Florida in 3D made him feel like he was back there again. A brain fart or two later (and loads of hours playing around in Blender), Boys Go to Jupiter was born.

Influenced by Peanuts episodes, the offbeat Rankin/Bass holiday specials, the claymation Frog and Toad series, next to his own animated GIFS and work for Adult Swim, Glander delivers a surprising lo-fi indie film that somewhat resembles the look and feel of a cosy game. Boys Go to Jupiter even throws in a few memorable songs, including a ballad about the various ways you can eat eggs and an alien song about combo meals of every shape and size. More of a collage of encounters of the strange kind, it’s a fabulously bonkers film featuring bored teenagers and pretty bizarre interactions, yet Glander’s feature debut is also a timely story about economic inequality and our late-capitalist Western society.

This program screened as part of Kaboom Animation Festival 2025