{"id":1999703,"date":"2025-09-05T16:32:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T16:32:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1999703"},"modified":"2025-09-05T16:32:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T16:32:16","slug":"boys-go-to-jupiter-wasnt-meant-to-be-an-anti-capitalist-masterpiece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/boys-go-to-jupiter-wasnt-meant-to-be-an-anti-capitalist-masterpiece\/","title":{"rendered":"Boys Go to Jupiter wasn\u2019t meant to be an anti-capitalist masterpiece"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In writer \/ director Julian Glander<\/a>\u2019s new animated sci-fi feature Boys Go to Jupiter<\/em><\/a>, a young gig worker named Billy 5000 (Planet Money<\/em>\u2019s 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\u2019s semi-magical, \u201clet\u2019s get this bread\u201d style of thinking seems to stem from his fixation on a hustlebro streamer\u2019s videos. But as Boys go to Jupiter<\/em>\u2019s story unfolds, it becomes clear that all of the movie\u2019s characters have odd and somewhat dysfunctional relationships with money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Boys Go to Jupiter<\/em> bears the musicality and playful, toylike aesthetic that much of Glander\u2019s work does, whether it\u2019s shorts like Tennis Ball on His Day Off<\/em><\/a> or games like Art Sqool<\/em><\/a>. But the new movie\u2019s focus on how the gig economy can warp people\u2019s lives also makes it feel wildly different thematically.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s especially true in moments where Boys Go to Jupiter <\/em>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<\/em>, audiences find some inspiration to make art of their own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You\u2019ve spoken about how pandemic-induced psychosis and interacting with delivery workers during the pandemic\u2019s early years are part of what inspired you to start working on <\/strong>Boys Go to Jupiter<\/em><\/strong>. And I\u2019m 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Psychosis is probably not the most sensitive word to use, but think on a national level, that is what we experienced \u2014 some sort of hysteria. One thing that\u2019s been very disappointing is the way that we haven\u2019t learned any lessons from the pandemic. I think the national attitude toward the pandemic is \u2018what pandemic?\u2019 We don\u2019t 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\u2019m really fixing on is contactless delivery, which, you know, it\u2019s frictionless.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In theory, it\u2019s better for workers because they don\u2019t have to wait for you to open the door and talk to you. It\u2019s better for a lot of people who are getting food delivered because they don\u2019t want to have that interaction. But it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How did <\/strong>Boys Go to Jupiter<\/em><\/strong>\u2019s story evolve as you got deeper into the production process? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019m not sure it is anti-capitalist; it just has capitalism in it, and it\u2019s about life under capitalism. And it\u2019s hard to talk about that without coming across as anti-capitalist because this system is bad.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What kinds of ideas about people\u2019s relationships with money and capitalism were you keen on exploring here?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Jack [Corbett]\u2018s Planet Money<\/em> TikToks<\/a> 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<\/em>. 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\u2019re going to get rich. Because almost every character in the movie believes that somehow, someday, they\u2019re going to be rich, whether it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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, \u2018When I\u2019m rich, I\u2019m gonna have one of these in my kitchen.\u2019 That\u2019s such a normal, off-the-cuff thing to say, and I think we\u2019ve all expressed some variation of that feeling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Talk to me about what Jack Corbett brought to Billy as a character.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Jack really does something really special with this character. For people who know Jack\u2019s TikToks, Billy is so him. There are passages in the movie that basically feel like Planet Money<\/em>. There\u2019s a part where Billy\u2019s describing the sort of currency exchange he\u2019s doing, and then there\u2019s a scene where he\u2019s 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, \u2018There\u2019s no way you could have known this, but I was a pizza delivery boy in high school.\u2019 So it\u2019s like, it just felt very, very much like fate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s baked into it. Do you think of him and his channel as, like, a predatory presence?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019ve 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<\/em> or like the radio DJ in The Warriors<\/em>, who\u2019s like, \u2018The Warriors are now going down the tunnel.\u2019 That version of Mr. Moolah was one of the many elements of the movie where the more I looked at it, I said, \u2018This is not contemporary. This is not how people live now. This is the sort of Spielberg version of reality that this movie doesn\u2019t take place in.\u2019 And it was the same with Billy. He started out riding, like, a cool bike, which is like, well, that\u2019s just from E.T.<\/em> That\u2019s not really what kids do now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s not always possible, we saw the rise of this new self-help \/ hustle culture mutation that basically says, \u2018There\u2019s a certain amount of money that you are destined to.\u2019 That\u2019s 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\u2019s really not as much mobility as we\u2019d like to think there is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To get back to your actual question, I don\u2019t think Mr. Moolah is predatory because he\u2019s only getting, like, a hundred views. I was watching a lot of specific YouTube videos like Moolah\u2019s that were just, like, a guy on the worst quality camera ever, with a little white board, saying stuff that doesn\u2019t quite make enough sense to really sink in with people and make a change in their lives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If we pulled out on Mr. Moolah, he would probably be living in someone\u2019s garage or living in his parents\u2019 house. He\u2019s not like a Gary Vaynerchuk, or an Andrew Tate, or the guy who\u2019s always like, \u2018Sell me this pen.\u2019 He wants to be one of those people who\u2019s built an empire on scamming people, but like everyone else in the movie, he is just very low level.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We\u2019re living through this weird moment where quite a few people are championing generative AI as a tool that can \u201cdemocratize\u201d art, but then you look at something like Boys Go to Jupiter<\/em>, which was made with Blender \u2014 free, open-source software. What impacts do you think gen AI has on people\u2019s creativity?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I think there\u2019s a number of negative effects, obviously. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve made. That\u2019s a personal journey that everyone can go through, but what\u2019s more scary to me about the genre of AI stuff is the way it\u2019s being used to crush worker power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It doesn\u2019t 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\u2019m feeling very obsessed with workers right now. It\u2019s what I\u2019ve been thinking about for the last three years. So I think that\u2019s the thing with AI \u2014 nobody really knows what it is. It\u2019s not really doing what it is promising it\u2019s gonna do, so all we can do is sort of project whatever we\u2019re obsessed with onto it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And why have you been such a consistent proponent of Blender?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you want to talk about the actual promise of democratizing art and creativity, that\u2019s what it actually is. It\u2019s not a machine that does everything for you. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When Flow<\/em> won Best Animated Feature this year, it felt so good. I was like, \u2018That\u2019s my software up there. That\u2019s like my little computer program up there.\u2019 It\u2019s very powerful, and it\u2019s free.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You\u2019re big into <\/strong>associating shapes with concepts and feelings<\/strong><\/a>. If the country\u2019s current vibe \u2014 the atmosphere, the mood \u2014 could be turned into a shape, what shape would it be? What about the internet in 2025?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I think, currently, the country\u2019s mood is a spiky shape \u2014 like a dog toy or a ball with a lot of spikes. There\u2019s a real bristling sense of tension throughout the country. Things are very unstable politically, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s something that, over time, has become really refined and smoothed into a sort of irresistible, frictionless object.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s hard to say if I\u2019m just getting older, I think there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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