Just as the pulsating pastels in “Boys Go to Jupiter” reflect the unreal sunsets that nature has to offer in Florida, it is accepted as an unusual yet organic part of the firmament of Julian Glander’s strange and wonderful animated comedy is rooted hardcore economic theory when the absurdity of late-stage capitalism has as much humor to offer as the likes of Sarah Sherman, Julio Torres and Janeane Garofalo, who help round out its cast. Glander didn’t look to the alt comedy scene to find a voice for Billy, the 16-year-old courier for Grubster that serves as the film’s lead, but rather NPR’s “Planet Money” where he could find a better fit in the enthusiastic Jack Corbett, who regularly breaks down the stock market for fun on the program’s TikTok feed. It’s an unconventional bit of casting that makes all the sense in the world as it skewers a reality that makes none as Billy is already planning for winter break in the middle of a hot summer, believing he can “channel vibrations into dollars,” though the vibes he gets on deliveries are usually pretty strange with customers either taking conversations to eccentric places or not wanting to make them at all.
This real work of the job is hardly worth the compensation, which is filtered through a number of taxes and fees that make the actual take-home pay minuscule, but Billy stumbles into something potentially rewarding when making a stop at Dolphin Groves, the juice manufacturer that’s a big business in the city, to bring some takeout to the auspiciously named Rosario Dolphin (Miya Folick), heir to the family dynasty but in constant conflict with her mother over her preference to be called Rozy and to hang out in the bowels of the lab. Her apathy towards corporate secrets leads to Billy ending up pocketing an “experimental lemon” from his trip, with its presence out in the wild making the bizarre terrain he navigates that much more so as it helps to attract an alien lifeforce.
Using the same technology that was deployed for the Oscar-nominated “Flow,” Glander is able to bring his idiosyncratic vision for contemporary times unmediated as Billy has to find what works for him as opposed to the other way around and punctuated with irresistible musical numbers, the film otherwise has a laid-back charm as you get to settle into a community where everyone has their individual quirks and find they can avoid being subsumed by any kind of system by force of personality. When “Boys Go to Jupiter” begins its U.S. theatrical tour this week starting at the IFC Center in New York, it is bound to stand out for the same reasons and shortly before Glander hits the road to accompany the film on a few dates along with members of his starry ensemble, the Pittsburgh-based filmmaker generously took the time to talk about how he found an inspired way to satirize the gig economy, the inspiration of the Florida landscape and why the most difficult thing to animate is what comes most naturally to most people.
How did this come about?
The story of the movie came from this obsession I got during the pandemic with delivery drivers. For about a year, outside of the people that I was quarantined with, they were the only people I had any communication with and the ritual that we all developed around getting food delivered in the pandemic I thought was actually so funny — the way a Grubhub driver would tell you they were coming and I’d be looking through the peephole to make sure that they set the food down and left. Then I’d open the door and grab the food off the ground like I was in an old-timey prison or something, like my meals were being slid through little prison bars. I felt like a cartoon character. I also thought it was very degrading for basically everyone. — to make someone drive all the way across town to give you a chicken sandwich and to receive food that way. The only winner is the app who gets a ton of money. And in the pandemic, there was a moment that we were going to recognize these people as the heroes that they are — the truck drivers, Uber and Amazon drivers that are the people who keep society going — and we were really talking about essential workers, and then we all forgot about it. So I started thinking about these people’s internal lives and relating it to some jobs I had in high school, and that is where the gig economy story of Billy 5000 came from.
And you bring in some Keynesian theory and Jack Corbett with his economic knowhow. How did you decide to go that hard?
He brought it! I had messaged him probably four years ago and said, “Hey, I’m writing cartoons. Do you want to do some voice acting?” Because I was such a fan of his work. And there’s so much economic thinking in the movie that does come from Jack. The scene where he’s reading dense economic text is completely bogus, but I didn’t actually have anything written when Jack came into the booth [to record] and I said, “Do you have something off the top of your head that’s really dense, like early industrial age, British economic theory that has some stupid metaphor. And we were talking about this Keynesian thing called “the fish in the mud,” and what I really love about Jack’s work is he’s able to talk about it and puncture it and we had these great conversations like that throughout the entire process of making the movie. And it developed into this movie where the way the characters are defined in relation to each other is that they each have a different special relationship with money or with capitalism, which has become the core religion of America and the way we all worship it differently is what gives these characters their identities and the conflict between them.
Did the Florida milieu immediately come to mind?
I feel like almost everyone I talk to either live there at some point or has a relative down there or has very special memories of going to Disney World or Miami. I was a teenager, outside of Tampa, doing odd jobs a long time ago and I actually rejected Florida for a long time. I wanted the movie to be a little more abstract and how the gig economy would work on an alien planet where everyone lives in mushrooms. It was 3000 years in the future — and I just kept thinking that Florida was weirder. It’s a confusing part of America and I grew up in Land O’Lakes, which [people may] know from “Edward Scissorhands” with those those pastel rainbow houses. They’re real and they’re still there, but not painted those colors anymore and I actually I do think Florida is beautiful. It has a rotting beauty because the core spirit of Florida is really the story of air conditioning — this idea that post-World War II, we were suddenly able to go down into the swamp and build this paradise and they built Disney World and all these other attractions like the Dinosaur mini golf course that’s in the movie. Then over the course of the last 75 years, we’ve let that stuff start to rot, so there’s a mossy, nasty, evil magic to everything in Florida.
You get the right just right too – was it tricky to light this?
I have to say it was it was given almost no consideration. I use Blender’s Eevee engine, which is a real-time rendering engine and what’s awesome about that is it’s almost like being on a real physical set where you can move the lights anytime you want. For the most part, I think my take on 3D animation is that a lot of people get very technical and really overdo it. When I see people break down their scenes, on that “Blade Runner” sci fi stuff and there’s too much lighting, and for a lot of the shots in this movie, there is basically one diagonal light that’s hitting everything and then maybe a few point lights for emphasis, but I think that comes from my illustration background where things have to read really quickly and economically and just one beautiful diagonal sunlight is often all you need. If you could get the sun exactly where you wanted it in real life, you would never need any other lighting, so in 3D, that’s what you can do. That’s the magic of it.
How much room is there to be inspired by what the performance is?
Yeah, I made a rough cut of the movie with scratch audio from myself, basically just to make sure that we were hitting 90 minutes and that we were prepared for the voice acting sessions because we really didn’t have much time with the cast. Some of these cast members came in for an hour, so I didn’t want to get caught up on something that just sounded weird and my producer and I did so many read-throughs of the script and recorded it so many times. Then I once we had that and felt we were on solid ground, there was room to improvise, specifically scenes that are more tangential to the plot.
The best example is Chris Fleming scene where he plays the owner of the world’s largest hot dog, and basically all our main character has to pick up a hot dog and leave, and [the Chris Fleming character] has to talk and sell this worldview that he has ad I had written stuff down, but Chris Fleming basically came in and like when the Tasmanian Devil turns into a tornado, he was like in the booth like that, just doing his thing. I was so impressed, and this was true for the whole cast. And the question I get a lot [about the cast] is are these people for real? Are they actually how they are in their stand up? And I would say yes. I was so happy to get the Chris Fleming experience, and it makes the film what it is. Anyone who goes to see this wants to see this cast and from seeing the list, you probably know right away if you’re going to like this movie or not and I’m massively indebted to all 15 of them for showing up like that.
What was it like to ask some of them to sing when that wasn’t necessarily a known talent?
This is something I had been running my mouth on for a long time, that if I ever did a feature, it would be a musical, but not in the usual way because I find that a lot of my favorite movies are musicals, like “The Wizard of Oz,” “Grease” or “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. What I really like about those musicals is that they have a strong musical point of view that’s not Broadway, so in both the voice acting and the singing, my only real directive was for the cast to be themselves and use their natural voices and go for a more naturalistic sound. The sound palette of the movie is more what the characters will be listening to, or what a 16-year-old living in his sister’s garage would be making on his laptop, which very conveniently is the music that I like to listen to.
It seemed like the sonic textures and the visual textures are of one piece. How much do those processes complement one another?
The approach to color and sound is basically the exact same, and there’s obviously science there, but it’s so intuitive. In the 3D viewport, I’m basically just dragging my mouse around the color wheel until I find something that’s I describe as like an eye tingle and then if it’s just one shade off, it does not work for me anymore. The sound is the same. It’s so fun to sit there with a modular synth and just make things gooier or harder. The hard part of it is stopping because you could tinker forever and it’s so joyful.
Was there anything that was a particularly hard sequence to crack?
The hardest stuff is characters walking and that’s always true of a lot of animation projects because we’re all very sensitive to what it looks like. When it’s wrong, there’s 100 muscles at play and it just looks really wrong. So what I’m most proud of is some of the workarounds that we found to not have people walk. I spent a whole day on this one shot where Miya Folick’s character and Jack Corbett’s character are walking down a flight of stairs and at the end of the day, it looked so bad. And I [thought], “I can’t spend a week on this. I’m going to quit the movie if I get stuck on this,” so I just had them go down a little forklift elevator instead. But when you add in the sound effect, you can sell it as one of the mechanical sci-fi elements of the movie and that’s what I love about taking on a big project like this. I keep finding the shortcuts that actually make it better. That’s so rewarding.
What’s it been like to see this film get out into the world?
A lot better than I expected. I made this movie with my best friend and some actors that I knew from the internet and I thought we would maybe do one festival and then put it up on YouTube. But to do 40 festivals is really cool. I can’t be there for most of them, so I’m sitting here refreshing Letterboxd every time I know it’s screening. [laughs] But I thought I’d be really sick of watching this movie and every time I go to a theater to watch it with people, it’s completely new to me because it’s a completely new group and just to look around and have it bounce off people. What can I say? That’s what it’s all about.
“Boys Go to Jupiter” opens on August 8th in New York at the IFC Center, kicking off a month-long theatrical tour across the country. A full list of theaters and dates is here.