In writer / director Julian Glander’s new animated sci-fi feature Boys Go to Jupiter, a young gig worker named Billy 5000 (Planet Money’s Jack Corbett) hoverboards his way through life in Florida with only one thing on his mind: he needs $5,000 and is willing to deliver as much food as it takes to make the cash. At first, the delivery guy’s semi-magical, “let’s get this bread” style of thinking seems to stem from his fixation on a hustlebro streamer’s videos. But as Boys go to Jupiter’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that all of the movie’s characters have odd and somewhat dysfunctional relationships with money.
Boys Go to Jupiter bears the musicality and playful, toylike aesthetic that much of Glander’s work does, whether it’s shorts like Tennis Ball on His Day Off or games like Art Sqool. But the new movie’s focus on how the gig economy can warp people’s lives also makes it feel wildly different thematically.
That’s especially true in moments where Boys Go to Jupiter zeroes in on the ways that food delivery platforms can dehumanize and shortchange their workers, and it seems like Glander is using the services to highlight why capitalism is bad. But when I recently spoke with Glander, he told me that it was never really his intention to make an anti-capitalist work of art. Glander wanted to make a movie about the connections that society seems to have lost since the height of the covid-19 pandemic. And he hopes that, in Boys Go to Jupiter, audiences find some inspiration to make art of their own.
You’ve spoken about how pandemic-induced psychosis and interacting with delivery workers during the pandemic’s early years are part of what inspired you to start working on Boys Go to Jupiter. And I’m so curious to hear your thoughts about whether people have been able to shake that psychosis and develop a deeper appreciation for gig workers in the time since.
Psychosis is probably not the most sensitive word to use, but think on a national level, that is what we experienced — some sort of hysteria. One thing that’s been very disappointing is the way that we haven’t learned any lessons from the pandemic. I think the national attitude toward the pandemic is ‘what pandemic?’ We don’t talk about it anymore. The new antisocial rituals that we developed to keep ourselves safe from this disease are still in place, and the one that I’m really fixing on is contactless delivery, which, you know, it’s frictionless.
In theory, it’s better for workers because they don’t have to wait for you to open the door and talk to you. It’s better for a lot of people who are getting food delivered because they don’t want to have that interaction. But it’s also very dehumanizing because it takes away one of the most sacred and important things about eating a meal, which is having a connection to the person who prepared it.
How did Boys Go to Jupiter’s story evolve as you got deeper into the production process?
It was a bit surprising to me when the reviews started coming in, and the movie kind of got pegged as being an anti-capitalist movie because that was not on the top of my mind when I was writing it. I’m not sure it is anti-capitalist; it just has capitalism in it, and it’s about life under capitalism. And it’s hard to talk about that without coming across as anti-capitalist because this system is bad.
The movie started out as a very fantastical story about this boy who gets an alien. But as I wrote it and started working with the cast, it became more and more about work because it was such an obsession of mine and something that I think a lot of people want to see more stories about.
What kinds of ideas about people’s relationships with money and capitalism were you keen on exploring here?
Jack [Corbett]‘s Planet Money TikToks really got my wheels turning on this idea of economics being something bigger than just a section of the newspaper or something that happens in The Economist. He got me thinking about economics as a cultural force or even a religion. My way into writing these characters for the movie is that each of them has almost like a different denomination or a different belief in essentially how they’re going to get rich. Because almost every character in the movie believes that somehow, someday, they’re going to be rich, whether it’s from a winning lottery ticket, from their hustle, from their inheritance, or from something even more magical than that. I think that sort of thinking is a universal American attitude.
I was at Target the other day and a lot of people were doing their back-to-school shopping. I saw this girl looking at a classic KitchenAid mixer, and she said to her friend, ‘When I’m rich, I’m gonna have one of these in my kitchen.’ That’s such a normal, off-the-cuff thing to say, and I think we’ve all expressed some variation of that feeling.
Talk to me about what Jack Corbett brought to Billy as a character.
Jack really does something really special with this character. For people who know Jack’s TikToks, Billy is so him. There are passages in the movie that basically feel like Planet Money. There’s a part where Billy’s describing the sort of currency exchange he’s doing, and then there’s a scene where he’s reading this very obtuse, 1800s economic theory that we wrote together. But he also brought so much of his life and his sense of agitation to the movie. When I sent him the script, he wrote me back about an hour later and said, ‘There’s no way you could have known this, but I was a pizza delivery boy in high school.’ So it’s like, it just felt very, very much like fate.
Mr. Moolah is such an unhinged character but also feels like the perfect crystallization of YouTube hustlebro culture and the sort of sad, desperate energy that’s baked into it. Do you think of him and his channel as, like, a predatory presence?
I’ve never had a chance to talk about this. Mr. Moolah was originally written as a local radio DJ to sort of guide us through the beats of the movie, like Sam Jackson in Do the Right Thing or like the radio DJ in The Warriors, who’s like, ‘The Warriors are now going down the tunnel.’ That version of Mr. Moolah was one of the many elements of the movie where the more I looked at it, I said, ‘This is not contemporary. This is not how people live now. This is the sort of Spielberg version of reality that this movie doesn’t take place in.’ And it was the same with Billy. He started out riding, like, a cool bike, which is like, well, that’s just from E.T. That’s not really what kids do now.
The Mr. Moolah we see in the movie has an almost cosmic, metaphysical view of money, which is something that I think people really started embracing after the pandemic began. So much of 2010s hustle culture was about this idea that if you grind, if you give up your sleep and your life, you will make money. But as the reality kicked in that that’s not always possible, we saw the rise of this new self-help / hustle culture mutation that basically says, ‘There’s a certain amount of money that you are destined to.’ That’s actually true. Not in a magical way, but in a factual sort of economic way. We are all pretty much born with a certain range of income that we can kind of expect, and there’s really not as much mobility as we’d like to think there is.
To get back to your actual question, I don’t think Mr. Moolah is predatory because he’s only getting, like, a hundred views. I was watching a lot of specific YouTube videos like Moolah’s that were just, like, a guy on the worst quality camera ever, with a little white board, saying stuff that doesn’t quite make enough sense to really sink in with people and make a change in their lives.
If we pulled out on Mr. Moolah, he would probably be living in someone’s garage or living in his parents’ house. He’s not like a Gary Vaynerchuk, or an Andrew Tate, or the guy who’s always like, ‘Sell me this pen.’ He wants to be one of those people who’s built an empire on scamming people, but like everyone else in the movie, he is just very low level.
We’re living through this weird moment where quite a few people are championing generative AI as a tool that can “democratize” art, but then you look at something like Boys Go to Jupiter, which was made with Blender — free, open-source software. What impacts do you think gen AI has on people’s creativity?
I think there’s a number of negative effects, obviously. It’s keeping people from really learning how to make art or express themselves on their own. I think a lot of creative people, young people especially, are denying themselves the chance to struggle and learn how to draw or denying themselves the chance to be embarrassed by a bad drawing that they’ve made. That’s a personal journey that everyone can go through, but what’s more scary to me about the genre of AI stuff is the way it’s being used to crush worker power.
It doesn’t even really deliver good results, but it can still be used to cut wages, and even just the kind of looming threat of it can be used to suppress people and put people out of work. I’m feeling very obsessed with workers right now. It’s what I’ve been thinking about for the last three years. So I think that’s the thing with AI — nobody really knows what it is. It’s not really doing what it is promising it’s gonna do, so all we can do is sort of project whatever we’re obsessed with onto it.
And why have you been such a consistent proponent of Blender?
If you want to talk about the actual promise of democratizing art and creativity, that’s what it actually is. It’s not a machine that does everything for you. It’s a community that works together. The things that have kept me working in Blender for 12 years now is that the program is open-source, the developers listen to and make things for their users, and the community makes things for each other. I probably watched a thousand YouTube tutorials to make this movie.
When Flow won Best Animated Feature this year, it felt so good. I was like, ‘That’s my software up there. That’s like my little computer program up there.’ It’s very powerful, and it’s free.
You’re big into associating shapes with concepts and feelings. If the country’s current vibe — the atmosphere, the mood — could be turned into a shape, what shape would it be? What about the internet in 2025?
I think, currently, the country’s mood is a spiky shape — like a dog toy or a ball with a lot of spikes. There’s a real bristling sense of tension throughout the country. Things are very unstable politically, but it’s also the end of summer, which is the time when people get really agitated. And I actually think the internet would be the opposite. The internet in 2025 is like a very smooth rock that you find at the beach. It’s something that, over time, has become really refined and smoothed into a sort of irresistible, frictionless object.
It’s hard to say if I’m just getting older, I think there’s a general sense that the internet is losing its magic and that it has become a lot like cable TV, or QVC, or some other legacy thing that we thought we had left behind. The flow of information is not so multidirectional anymore, and that, to me, makes the internet feel like a flat rock from the beach.
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