For movie fans, the word “Rosebud” conjures visions of Charles Foster Kane dying alone and unhappy in his palatial mansion Xanadu. But for a certain subset of gamers, Rosebud will always be the magic code word that gets you infinite money in The Sims. When Julian Glander set out to make Boys Go to Jupiter, he was likely thinking about both of those references.
In select theaters now, Boys Go to Jupiter is an indie animated film about life in central Florida — and also a donut-shaped alien creature that becomes friends with a 16-year-old genius named Billy 5000.
It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, but instead of goofing off with his friends, Billy (Jack Corbett) is hustling to make deliveries on a DoorDash-like app called Grubster. This loose semblance of a plot gives Glander (who wrote, directed, and produced Boys Go to Jupiter) an excuse to set up various encounters with bizarre characters played by popular alt-comedians. Billy’s delivery gig brings him to a dinosaur-themed mini-golf course run by Herschel Cretaceous (Joe Pera) and a hot dog stand run by a talkative owner named Weenie (Chris Fleming). Eventually, one delivery takes Billy to a local orange juice factory run by a brilliant scientist, Dr. Dolphin (Janeane Garofalo), where he meets Dolphin’s daughter, Rozebud (Miya Folick).
Dr. Dolphin spots “Donut” (as Billy named the creature) and offers to buy it for $5,000, putting our hero in an awkward position: take the money he’s been working toward, or protect this adorable glowing blob he just met but has quickly grown attached to.
Boys Go to Jupiter is unabashedly weird, full of squishy creatures, talking dolphins, and non-sequiturs. It’s hilarious, in an offbeat, Gen Z sort of way that feels built for the TikTok-no-attention-span generation, but also rewards your ability to sink into the slower moments that take more than 60 seconds to pay off. But above all else, it’s breathtakingly beautiful.
Glander’s vision of modern Americana is all neon colors and blocky shapes. Boys Go to Jupiter looks like a mid-’90s game you would have played on the original PlayStation (complimentary). Within that simplicity, he’s able to create striking vistas and three-dimensional characters. The obvious visual comparison is The Sims with its overhead perspective and simple, early gaming graphics. The movie also conveys visual information in a similar way — for example, when Billy’s smartphone runs out of power, a dead-battery icon floats across the screen. Even the alien-ish creatures speak in a garbled language reminiscent of Simlish.
In an interview with the podcast Cinema File, Glander confirms the Sims connection, admitting that he’s not much of a gamer before adding:
“One game I played a lot is The Sims, which really informed this sort of top-down isometric look, and The Sims is also a very sly and funny and silly critique of consumerism that sort of implicated you because you’re enjoying the pleasure of consumerism, but you also see how cheap and empty it is. That’s my read of The Sims that I had when I was 11.”
There’s a similar message at the heart of Boys Go to Jupiter. None of us can escape capitalism, so we may as well enjoy it while we can — as long as that doesn’t mean handing over your adorable alien buddy to an evil CEO.