BOYS GO TO JUPITER - Mark Reviews Movies

Boys Go to Jupiter, Cartuna / Irony Point

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 7, 2025

The aesthetic of Boys Go to Jupiter could be described in three ways. The first—and most generous—of them is that it looks like a child's playset brought to animated life. Some might recall the specific brand of toys that the characters are reminiscent of here—the ones with the lanky limbs and round heads with smiling faces. The second way is that it has the appearance of an independent video game, in which the player explores a brightly colorful and isometric world, and that makes sense, since the story amounts to our protagonist doing a string of main missions with some side ones.

The third—and least generous—way to describe the look of writer/director Julian Glander's feature debut is that it appears to have been made with computers from a decade or more ago. The characters' proportions aren't quite right, with arms that stretch down to or past their knees, and the motion of things sometimes feels like a processor trying to catch up with the animation.

One imagines Glander would be fine to some degree with all of these descriptions, since he did oversee the production mostly on his own on a limited budget, is certainly bringing to mind the kind of thinking of teenagers who see life as a kind of game to be played, and surely perceives this world as a sort of playset that is only limited by his imagination. There's a definite charm to this aimless animated comedy about a group of kids who only seem capable of holding one aim in their brains at any given moment.

Charm, however, isn't enough here. Even with it, the movie still rambles on, creates a plot and subplots that eventually overshadow the laid-back and threadbare nature of its initial story, and is too absurd to really make much of a point about its characters and ideas. It's an intriguing concept, both on a visual level and a narrative one, but like its cast of random actors and comedians and amateurs, the eclectic nature of the movie seems to be the entire reason for its existence.

There is a basic plot, which eventually becomes more and unnecessarily complicated as it progresses. It revolves around a 16-year-old boy named Billy 5000 (voice of Jack Corbett), who has dropped out of high school, lives in the garage of his older sister Gail (voice of Eva Victor), and has one goal in his head. He wants to make $5,000, in order to offer a down payment on a place of his own, because he wants to live his own life (and his sister has no idea he has given up on school). Billy has become a delivery person for an online food-delivery service, and the teen, a math whiz, believes he has found a loophole in the system, involving currency exchanges that basically triples his pay for every delivery.

The setting is impossibly sunny Florida, where the kids wear shorts and t-shirts even during winter with a new year approaching. As Billy hustles around town to stop at assorted restaurants and bring food to local residents, his best buddies Freckles (voice of Grace Kuhlenschmidt) and Beatbox (voice of Elsie Fisher) hang out, do tricks on skateboards, make music, torment Billy's little cousin, and wait for their friend to finish his deliveries for the day and, hopefully, realize that spending time with them would be more fun.

At first, the randomness of the narrative is endearing, as the teens hatch their little schemes (Freckles pretends to be hit by a minivan, for example, to try to convince the driver, whose head takes up the entirety of the vehicle's open window, to buy the kids beer) and the locals offer up odd little diversions. There's a miniature golf course owner (voiced by Joe Pera), who's trying to keep the family business afloat (The course is dinosaur-themed, apparently because the family name is Cretaceous). An older woman (voiced by Cole Escola) raises chickens that think the stray golf balls are their eggs, and Weenie (voice of Chris Fleming) runs a hot dog stand with the world's biggest hot dog sitting atop it, although the economic shift toward deliveries makes the lonely guy want anyone to talk to him about anything, really.

These little details are weirdly amusing. The bigger ones, which include a secret scheme on the part of juice manufacturer Dr. Dolphin (voice of Janeane Garofalo) and a pair of strange creatures—one that looks like a glowworm and another that's best described as a sentient donut—who emerge from the beach, are simply weird for the sake of it and a semi-straightforward plot. Dr. Dolphin, who might be the child of a human-dolphin hybrid made by NASA decades ago, wants the donut-thing, but Billy is too smitten with the doctor's daughter Rozebud (voice of Miya Folick) to really care about anything else happening in the lab/factory.

Boys Go to Jupiter is getting at something with its intentional meandering and ideas about growing up in the modern world. It also overwhelms those notions with too much plot and a level weirdness that makes it difficult to take anything about the movie seriously.

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