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| Boys Go To Jupiter |
Julian Glander is an artist, illustrator and animator who has never stopped short of pursuing his distinctive vision. He is perhaps best known for the cult video game Art Sqool, but he’s also laid down a lot of short work as a director, working for the likes of Disney, Adult Swim and the Cartoon Network. Now he’s making his first venture into feature-length film with Boys Go To Jupiter. It’s screening as part of the Glasgow Film Festival, and it’s a peculiar little fable with a look that is all it’s own. There’s really nothing else like it on the festival circuit. I ask Julian why he chose to take on a feature at this point in his life, and why this was the story to do it with.
“I was at South by Southwest a number of years ago and a friend of mine had just completed their feature and he was having like a pool party, a big celebration,” he says. “Everyone was giving him high fives and drinking champagne. And I was looking like, ‘Oh, I want that, I want to do that.’ This friend of mine, without name dropping, the feature ended up being a big success. I basically went up to him and said ‘Hey, I'm thinking about doing a feature.’ A lot of other people who I had asked or who I had mentioned that I'd be to were very much like, ‘Oh, how are you going to fund it? How are you going to make it?’ His first question was ‘What's the story?’
“I really liked that. I had a really great conversation with him and he told me to send him the script. I lied and said I had a script, so I went home and wrote the script in about a month so I could send it to him. The idea itself for the movie came from a New York Times article I had read about 10 years ago about this orange juice company called Natalie's Orange Juice. And the story there is, it was a family run business that was having a hard time passing the company on to the next generation. The story was actually behind a paywall, so I never read it. I only read the first paragraph. And I think because of that I was making up my own story.
“I thought ‘Oh, there's something very juicy – no pun intended – but there's some very fun about doing something with such small stakes, but then having this family business dynamic. And I'm from Florida, which is the orange juice capital of the world. So from there it expanded out into a story that's not just about an orange juice company, but it's about the people of suburban Florida and the weird ways that they live their lives and the things they're trying to do to get by.”
It all seems very small stakes, I agree, but it's big in the characters’ lives and in the context of what they have going on, because they don't have very much going on.
“I think that's true for a lot of people,” he says. “It certainly is true for me. I think a lot of people can relate. When they look back at the biggest challenges of their lives or the times when they thought they were fighting the biggest battles, it was all pretty small stakes.”
I tell him that I like the fact that in most films about kids that age, they're having big parties and big dramatic moments, and proms and so forth, whereas these kids seem much more relatable to me. They have very little to do, and they're hitting that age where they've got very different things going on. He agrees that that’s at the core of the film.
“When I see the prom scene or the big final football game in the teen movie, I think ‘That never happened to me’. When I think of age 16, I think of myself sitting on the curb at a gas station or just melting in the hot sun, trying to find a pool to swim in or trying to find a ride to the mall. But within that, there are really special, beautiful moments, and those specific moments are what I tried to build the whole film around.
“I found as I was writing that I have the bad qualities that all the characters have. I have the impatience and obsessiveness of the main antagonist, who's the owner of the orange juice company. But Billy, who's the main teenage boy character, he's a little bit of me. He's also a lot of Jack Corbett, who plays him. I first found his work on TikTok. He does the NPR Planet Money TikToks. Those Tiktoks really inform the character. Jack has a really interesting point of view about the economy, which is a huge part of the movie.”
The film has a really strong cast overall. Was that something that benefited from the connections he’s established in the industry over time?
“It was a mix,” he says. “I had just finished doing the illustrations for a children's book by Julio Torres. I had worked with Elsie Fisher on a TV show a few years ago. And some of the people in the movie were just Twitter friends of mine or Instagram friends, or people who I had had one or two exchanges with. We really pulled the cast all together by just DMing people. I look back and it's kind of a miracle that it worked. But yeah, I mean, the cast is incredible. If anyone gets anything out of the movie, it's because of their performance. And it made my job very easy, to animate the stuff that they gave me in the booth.”
How did you decide on the technique that he wanted to use, animation wise, and how long did it take him to put all that together?
“I've been working in Blender, which is a free open source 3D modeling program,” he says. “I've been using that for about 10 years. And yeah, over the years I've developed some shortcuts and some things that I just really like: the bright colours and the way shapes are blocked out and the way rooms are designed. But yeah, it took about a year to animate. And just in terms of shortcuts, we took them where we could, certainly. I don't think anyone is going to confuse us with a Pixar movie. I hope that it has its own charm and its own sort of aesthetic.
“In animation, walk cycles are the most expensive, time consuming thing. The way a character walks says a lot about them. And as a viewer, when you watch it, you're very sensitive to it because we all know what a person walking is supposed to look like; and when it's wrong, it looks really wrong. So in this movie, basically no one walks.” He laughs. “The main character rides around on a little hoverboard. People are kind of hidden in their cars or behind fences. There was a scene where I had two characters walking down a flight of stairs that was taking me all day, and I finally said ‘This is just going to be an elevator platform instead.’ But what I found, and this is true not just about walking but about a lot of things in the movie, I found that when I had a shortcut like that, it actually pushed us to find something a little more interesting, a little more distinct. There's a character that Julio Torres plays who's basically just a face in a door. And again, that just came from being very tired and being very low on resources, but it's a better choice than just having him be a human character. That's how you get a feature film done in a year with no money.”
There’s one character in the film who is a little different – an alien visitor. Where did that idea come from? Was it about providing an external perspective?
“When I was writing the movie, I had just gotten two baby ducklings as pets. I got them when they were three days old and I was watching them grow up as I was writing this and I just thought they were so weird. I mean, they are weird little creatures. They're like little aliens. Aliens come out of eggs. But they were so sweet. And yeah, it was my first time having a pet and I was discovering a cautiously nurturing side of myself that I found myself enjoying more than I thought I would. So I put it in the movie.”
We see those changes in the boys as well, I note. When we first encounter them, they're quite aggressive, and over time they settle down a bit and start to take more responsibility. People have called it a coming of age movie.
“It definitely is,” he says. “It's a different take on a coming of age movie. But at the core, beyond the aliens and the crazy orange juice owner and the wild comedy characters, it is about a 16-year-old boy who is at a big turning point in his life. And it's just like you said, he's finding that he has less and less in common with his friends and that he has new things that he's interested in. It ends up being very painful for him, both emotionally and literally. He goes through a lot in this movie.
“The story changed so much after that first draft, and again, a lot of it was the cast. I was rewriting things as I sent them out to people to act in them. When I messaged Sarah Sherman and said ‘Do you want to play this crazy neighbour?’ she was like, ‘Sure, send it to me.’ And then over the course of a day before I sent it to her, I rewrote the character partially to fit her voice, but also partially to make it something worth doing for her, you know? And that process, I went through 15 times with my 15 voice actors, and really, I think, gave the movie a little more richness.
“Things changed a ton. The ending changed a number of times. The characterisations changed as we cast the movie. And something that's really cool about doing this DIY is if I wanted to change the ending, there was nobody that I had to go report that to. There was nobody I had to get approval from. I texted my producer and basically said ‘Hey, I'm going to blow up this ending. I want to do something a little more outrageous.’ She was like, ‘Okay, fine.’ You know, there's a lot of pressure on that, a lot of stress, to be the person that's responsible, but it was so liberating. I love doing it that way.”
People often say that the problem with making films is that after you have a hit, you end up working for people who will give you more money, but you lose a lot of that control. Where does he see himself going with that? Does he want to hold on to as much control as possible, or is it more important to have more resources and be able to make films in different ways?
“It's a really good question,” he says. “That is something that I am dealing with every day. I'd love to get some more money. I mean, I worked basically for free on this for more than two years. The cast didn't get what they deserved. Nobody that worked on it really got what they deserved. Everyone did it as a favour or from passion. But I would do again the exact same way in heartbeat if I had to or if that ended up being the best way. It's an awesome process.
“I think we're at a special moment where – and this has been promised for years and years – animation is going to be in the hands of independent creators. And we see now, with the animated movie Flow, which is up for an Oscar this year, that yeah, we can do this ourselves. There's so much going on outside of the conventional film industry. So I know that every interview ends with the ‘What's next?’ question. I just really don't have an answer, but I feel good about it, whatever happens.”
I ask if he intends to return to the other types of project he’s worked on in the past, or if film is something that's important to him now.
“I had the best time,” he says. “I liked doing this, and I think, yeah, the issues of money and whatever aside, I'd love to just do films over and over and over. I'm addicted to it now. I also miss making video games. It's been five years since I put out a video game, and I love them. So I don't know – maybe I can figure out how to do a project that's both.”
In the meantime, there’s the Glasgow Film Festival to be excited about.
“I'm having a great time from where I am over here in Pittsburgh,” he says. “The team is great. The youth programming group is awesome. I chatted with them a few days ago. It's a big honour. I wish I could be there in person. I'm here with my new baby, so I'm not traveling very much, but yeah, it's a great festival. I'm honoured to be a part of it.”
