Perhaps the secret to making a great coming-of-age movie in 2025 is making everything look like it’s happening in a mobile game. As early adolescence becomes an increasingly online experience — sure, kids still play sports and go outside, but the kind of unsupervised exploration captured in films like “Stand by Me” is now far more likely to happen in open world games than on bikes without a parent in sight — it helps to meet dejected youngsters on their own hyper-colorful, overstimulating level.
Not that Julian Glander’s delightful debut feature “Boys Go to Jupiter” ever acknowledges its digital sheen. The 3D animator, who branches out into filmmaking after a career spent making graphics for everyone from The New York Times to Adult Swim, immerses us in a world that appears to be constructed out of virtual Play-Doh, with candy-colored blobs forming a whimsical backdrop for characters with endearingly simple faces who run around discussing hot dog philosophy, magical sentient lemons, and whether the defective golf balls from a local miniature golf course are actually eggs.
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It looks like a cool YouTube video your friend would have sent you during the early Obama years, when we were all collectively discovering the then-fresh aesthetic of internet weirdness and nobody felt the need to cynically analyze anyone else’s intentions for posting such silliness. But there’s no escapism to be found for its characters. This is their real world, and they have real problems.
Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), an utterly average early-twentysomething who just happens to have a name fit for a robot, is on a mission. It’s the day after Christmas, and he desperately needs to make $5,000 by New Year’s Eve. His media diet of grindset podcasts and hustle culture videos have convinced him to focus his efforts on delivering food through an app called Grubster (which boasts the catchy slogan “Have a Grubby Day”).
The money is not great on paper, but he’s found a loophole: the app pays him in points that need to be converted to a currency of his choice. By choosing to be paid in Czech Koruna and taking advantage of an app glitch that converts it to Swedish Krona instead, he’s able to pocket $7 for every $1 he earns.
As he meanders around town performing strange requests for tips and beatboxing with his wealthier friends who don’t understand why he’s so focused on money, he encounters an ensemble of endearing customers who reflect the whimsy of a storybook town despite their modern preference for ordering food on their phones and having it left at their doors.
It’s not the worst way to spend your days — as Billy 5000 expresses in a song about how he doesn’t mind running errands, one of the best musical interludes in a film full of them — but things take a more existential turn when an encounter with the evil matriarch of a juice company and an accidental alien kidnapping force him to confront his morals and determine how far he’s willing to go to make a buck (or 5000).
“Boys Go to Jupiter” is one of the freshest films of 2025, brilliantly juxtaposing the endless creative opportunities afforded to us by digital art with the anxiety of a generation that often feels like its own real-world opportunities are becoming fewer and further between. Glander fills his world with “BoJack Horseman” levels of joke density while creating an aesthetic all his own. He’s happy to indulge in subtitled songs sung in alien languages about fast food, but manages to walk the ever-so-delicate line of being weird without succumbing to the dreaded “weird for the sake of being random.”
Indie animation remains one of the toughest niches to find traction in, but here’s hoping “Boys Go to Jupiter” launches the film career of an artist who graces us with his whimsy for decades to come.
Grade: B+
A Cartuna release, “Boys Go to Jupiter” is now playing in select theaters.
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