What happens when the classic era of CalArts-style animation grows up? The answer is Boys Go to Jupiter, an animated feature that gives the low-key surrealism of Regular Show its GED and shoves it out the door into the harsh world of not having much to do. High school dropout and math wizard Billy 5000 (Corbett) at least has his part time Grubster delivery gig to keep him and his best buds in snacks, which is all that really counts, especially since his mundane Day-Glo life is getting odd.
In this fictionalized, slightly fantastical vision of Florida, it’s all super-science citrus fruit, snowbirds with head trauma from slipping in the shower, gig economy daydreams, motivational apps, mini-golf graveyards, squishy aliens, and mutated dolphins. Boys Go to Jupiter would like you to know that it’s weird. Ya know? Like, really weird. But grounded, right? Because it uses a whole bunch of celebrities (Janeane Garofalo, Cole Escola, Julio Torres, Sarah Sherman) for several parts rather than more experienced voice actors. It’s determinedly wacky, a version of the Sunshine State where it’s just as likely that Billy will hang with a donut-shaped extraterrestrial as his prepubescent school friends. It’s a vibe, one emphasized by endless dream pop crafted by writer/director Julian Glander, and if you like the constant knowing cutesiness of the genre then you might enjoy Boys Go to Jupiter. But if you find its snoozy keyboard noodlings, monotone meanderings, and determined rejection of anything like a tune kind of bland, then, for all its intriguing visuals and vague anti-capitalist points about working a not-job, Boys Go to Jupiter may seem like a well-meaning but unimpactful exercise in slightly melancholic cool.
With a visual style that looks like a CG-rendered version of Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s plastic stop-motion delight A Town Called Panic, Boys Go to Jupiter is at its most interesting when Glander really plays in this Playmobil world he’s created. There’s a tactile yet dreamy feel to his Florida, a place of unreality where many adults are just door-shaped brown masses with faces, an indication of how much they just become barriers to the hopes and dreams of Billy and his crew. Sadly, with the strange-for-strange-sake feel of the plot, the end result is a little like watching your stoner buds playing The Sims 3 (Glander even relies on that classic Sims god-view isometric camera angle for his wide-angle shots). It feels like Glander was hoping to create something that all the former kids that grew up on Cartoon Network’s wild, weird era will gravitate towards. But the reality is that it’s not as bizarre, creative, transgressive, or even just plain entertaining as the average episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, and that was about a 12-year-old cat boy and his fish friend. Boys may also skew a little more mature in its depiction of near-adult relationships as Billy moons over citrus scientist Rozebud (Folick) but it’s got nowhere near the emotional depth that Adventure Time managed. Admittedly, those shows had years to build out their connection to the audience’s heart, and to fuse their strangest and most conventional moments. But there has to be more to insightful absurdity than having an alien food influencer singing a review of to-go spaghetti.