Julian Glander on Boys Go to Jupiter

Traditional animation is one of the most labour-intensive forms of filmmaking; a few seconds of action can often take teams of animators days to achieve. But powerful new 3D modelling software is making this backbreaking work a bit more manageable for independent filmmakers.

One of these new tools is the open-source program Blender, which Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis recently used to make the enchanting feature Flow, the independent underdog that won this year’s Best Animation Oscar ahead of Dreamworks' The Wild Robot and Pixar’s Inside Out 2. Other notable animations built using Blender in recent years include Jérémy Clapin’s I Lost My Body and Joe Ksander and Kevin R. Adams’s Next Gen, both low-budget, independently produced features which were snapped up by Netflix.

Blender has also been the platform of choice for American animator Julian Glander. He’s been using it for over a decade on various shorts and skits on adult swim, and it’s also how he made his feature-length debut Boys Go to Jupiter at home on his laptop. The film is an absurdist comic musical concerning the travails of Billy 5000 (voiced by TikTok star Jack Corbett, host of NPR’s Planet Money), a high-school dropout in Florida trying to make enough money from his food delivery job to move out of his sister’s garage.

While Billy 5000 wizzes around town on his electric scooter delivering meals, we meet his friends, family and various town oddballs (voiced by the likes of Elsie Fisher, Tavi Gevinson, Julio Torres, Sarah Sherman and Joe Pera). Billy 5000 also gets on the wrong side of an orange juice tycoon called Dr. Dolphin (voiced by Janeane Garofalo) and ends up adopting a squishy alien he dubs Donut. On top of all this absurdity, Boys Go to Jupiter is also a pin-sharp satire on the gig economy.

Boys Go to Jupiter was a highlight of the recent Glasgow Film Festival. Ahead of its UK premiere at the festival, we spoke to Glander about his delightfully idiosyncratic creation.

The Skinny: I'm always interested in how people get into animation, because it's such a peculiar art form. When did you discover that this is something you were passionate about?

Julian Glander: In the grand scheme of things, I started animating pretty late in life. I was working as an illustrator, and in the 2010s, illustration and animation kind of merged into a combined discipline and I started by doing GIFs. But actually, my first memory of animation is when I was probably four or five years old.

I asked my mom where cartoons lived, and if we would ever go see them. I think I’d seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and you know, in that film cartoons basically live in a different part of town. So I was like, ‘I'm not stupid, I know we probably don't have a Toontown near us, but, you know, maybe someday we could go see one?’ And my mom was like, ‘No, honey, cartoons aren't real. People make them’. And she showed me.

We sat down and cut up some pieces of paper, and we made flipbooks together. And her flipbook was a flower blooming, and my flipbook was a guy going up a diving board and jumping off of it. And I didn't even realise this until very recently but guess what the poster for Boys Go to Jupiter is...

It's Billy jumping off a diving board!

Exactly. So I kinda came full circle.

The first thing that struck me about Boys Go to Jupiter is its very specific animation style, which is both beautiful and incredibly detailed, but also intentionally kind of lo-fi and kind of janky as well. It’s certainly not what we think of as slick, mainstream animation. How did you develop that style?

Thinking about it in opposition to mainstream animation is a good way to think about it, because I love that stuff, obviously. I love the Minions more than anyone, and I particularly love classic stop-motion like Gumby and the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials – those are at the core of my heart. And this is a style that I've kind of developed using Blender over the past decade, where it's a mix of shortcuts that work, and things that look really good.

But I think my point of view coming into this is, does an animated movie have to be made in a $100 million pipeline with a ton of specialists, or could it be made more like a novel or a poem, where one person is just continuously pouring themselves into different elements of it? So, yeah, ‘janky’ is a word that I hear a lot; I understand why. But I want to pitch it as ‘handmade’.

The journey that Billy 5000 goes on is so charming and endlessly surprising. Do you remember a starting point for the premise of the film? 

I started completely on a tangent. I was reading an article about this orange juice company called [sic] Natalie's Orange Juice [Natalie's Orchid Island Juice Company is the full title]... I don't think it's worldwide. It's like a bougie orange juice that you would get in a fancy cafe or something. But the woman who started Natalie's Orange Juice named the company after her daughter, Natalie, and Natalie doesn't want to necessarily take over the orange juice company. This is happening in real life. As someone who grew up in Florida, which is the orange capital, I thought it was such a juicy, silly but dramatic premise. It felt Shakespearean to me. And from writing about this mother-daughter orange juice family, it spun out into what it actually is, which is a story about the gig economy and the people of Florida.

You create this really dreamy atmosphere that has a very relaxing quality. I watched Boys Go to Jupiter after a stressful day, and I just felt like I came down a couple of notches while watching it.

For me, a lot of my favourite movies have that sense of texture. We were really looking at this very specific genre that I would call 'suburban surrealism', so films like Napoleon Dynamite, Ghost World and Edward Scissorhands. The Florida Project is a big touch point too, obviously. My favourite kind of movies do this, where you sink into them and you almost forget that you're in a whole different world, and you forget that there's even a plot happening, and then it's over.

A huge part of what gives the film this atmosphere is the music. It's essentially a musical, where the songs act as kind of dreamy interludes. What appeals to you about the musical form?

I always knew that if I was ever going to do a feature film, I'd want it to be a musical. For me, my absolute favourite musicals are ones that have a really strong, specific musical point of view. So for example, I love Grease – I love how all its music sounds like it could be from the 1950s, you know? It doesn’t have the very traditional kind of Broadway bigness that you associate with musicals.

And you say interludes, it's funny because that's exactly what they are. When I was writing the script, when things were feeling like we needed a break, or I didn't know what to do, I would just put in brackets "musical moment", you know? And I would use them kind of as a bridge to say, well, this is where we learn how Billy is feeling. This is where we learn what Rozebud [Dr. Dolphin's daughter, an aspiring radical voiced by singer Miya Folick]'s place in the world is. This is where we can really get to know Grace Kuhlenschmidt's character, Freckles. And then just thinking of that, the music works because the cast is awesome: they came in and just kicked ass with it.

And you’ve composed most of that music too…

I did. Some of it was very traditional, intentional songwriting, and some of the scenes where it's just like a little keyboard was just improvising as I watched it live.

As you mentioned, the film is also an amazing satire of the modern gig economy. Were you using any previous jobs that you had as reference?

Jack [Corbett, who plays Billy] actually worked as an Uber Eats driver in college, so he brought a lot of that experience into the role. And as an illustrator and animator, I'm in a different part of the gig economy, but this is all stuff where the structure of work is the same. And I think as a journalist, you maybe have experienced this too, where it's 11 o'clock on a Friday night and you get an email, and it's an opportunity you just can't say no to.

For me, I've been telling myself that I was my own boss, that I was the master of my own little small business, when actually I was just 24/7 available to anyone in the world, and was never really not working. I think the gig economy, when it sort of debuted 10 or 15 years ago, was seen as being very sexy and exciting to all of us. And this movie is about coming to the realisation that behind the fun and games of using apps to make money, it's extremely brutal and humiliating, and there's really no path to prosperity within it.

That definitely come across very well, but I’d also say the film is incredibly hopeful. I don't want to spoil where it goes, but it suggests that there is a way out. Now Billy’s way out isn’t going to be a solution for everyone, but you do suggest we don’t have to continue in that cycle.

My point of view is we're coming to some sort of point of change with this stuff. Our relationship with work has changed a lot, and people are coming around to realise that it's not the right way. And yeah, I gave Billy the best ending that I could, you know, the best plausible ending that I could, without spoiling it, because it does go somewhere really interesting. But I am also hopeful. I'm hopeful that the world keeps changing and that it could possibly change for the better.

---

Boys Go to Jupiter had its UK premiere at Glasgow Film Festival and is awaiting UK distribution