What really is the Circle of Life for people (and animals) not comfortably positioned inside the perfectly calibrated version of Disneyland? Do the laws and mechanics of interconnectedness, balance, and harmony perfectly hold together? Or are they altogether null and void; in other words, simply another one of those lies — so gorgeously manufactured by the Wizard(s) of Hollywood — that you believe in them because, well, how could you not?
Julian Glander’s wildly ambitious and anarchic independent adult animated feature Boys Go to Jupiter posits that life in the “real” world — his “animated” version of Florida is governed by the structures of capitalism as much as, well, the real version of it — is, indeed, circular. His young adult characters — with their cartoonishly oversized heads and imperceptibly small facial features, as well as their (insufferably) quirky anachronisms — are caught up in what feels like a time loop. The conversations they have with each other, often framed in a wide shot exemplifying the emotional distance the characters feel from one another, serve little to no purpose; everything is either reduced to a gig-economy-like graft (à la Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You) that leads our protagonist, Billy 5000 (voiced by Jack Corbett), nowhere. Or, in the case of his Richard Linklater-lite slacker friends, to even more senseless bickering and beatboxing.
But Boys Go to Jupiter never feels stuck in the sort of rut that his characters seem to be stuck inside. Glander’s indie spirit is defined by a rebellion against a stultifying system; he insists on finding infinite possibilities (especially formally) that, at the very least, make Billy want to break free from his otherwise Jeanne Dielman-esque existence. Formally, this is most obviously evident in the film’s occasional break from absurd realism to absurd musicality. The film features no less than seven songs, all written by Glander himself, not to simply restate what has already been verbally expressed by the characters, but to break the film’s otherwise slack rhythm. Glander does this — somewhat inconsistently, but noticeably — on a micro-level, too. Some of the scenes that feature characters talking to each other are not just shot in wides, but rather in his unconventional “shot taking” style (courtesy of animation software Blender, which he talks about in detail on Cartoon Brew), which finds the director focusing in close-up on other objects within the frame (like a coffee mug filling) or at the edges of frame (where one finds a squiggly “angelic” creature who makes a critical reappearance later in the film’s increasingly bizarre narrative!) in a way that productively disrupts the flow of an otherwise conventional scene.
Admirable as all these deliberate wrinkles and anachronisms are, they cannot entirely overcome the film’s overall odd blend of bizarro and endearing twee. Glander gives a “big thanks” to Daniel Kwan (Swiss Army Man) and Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell with the Shoes On) in the film’s ending credits, which is fairly instructive of the lane of sickeningly cloying sentimentality that Boys Go to Jupiter eventually ends up committing to. That’s not to wholesale discount the film’s virtues: it remains admirably strange, and commits to playing with its variations of the Circle of Life perceptively. But any strong feeling or connection it engenders in the audience is simultaneously dampened by the layer of Sundance-approved quirk that shellacs the final product. What remains is begrudging admiration and a respect for the film’s form, and mileage will vary viewer to viewer on whether this is enough to tip the scales.
DIRECTOR: Julian Glander; CAST: Jack Corbett, Janeane Garofalo, Tavi Gevinson, Elsie Fisher; IN THEATERS: August 8; DISTRIBUTOR: Cartuna/Irony Point; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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