By Nick Nitkowski

Animation is a beautiful art form of storytelling. We’ve all seen such imaginative animation styles that paired well with some amazing stories that have withstood the test of time. And what’s even more amazing is how many more animated films like this are still being made and still sticking with us long after we leave the auditorium. And then there’s the opposite end of that coin.

Sadly, there are also a bunch of poorly animated films paired along with stories that don’t make any sense. Call it low budget, call it cutting costs, call it whatever you’d like, but there’s only one word that I can call it and that word is… “bad.” And unfortunately, “Boys Go to Jupiter” falls under the realm of bad, I’m sorry to say. Coming from someone who personally loves animation, this was not a film I could get behind.

The best way I can describe the animation in this movie is experimental-level CG animation. Remember back in the early 90s way before “Toy Story” came out when computer graphics were first being developed? Or how about those color-changing 3D pipe screensavers in the 90s? Or even those poorly-made animations you’ve seen in bowling alleys when you roll a strike? Picture all of that mixed in with rejected character designs from Playmobil and you essentially have the animation style of this movie.

The story of this film is even more nonsensical. It follows a teen who does food deliveries for money in an attempt to make $5,000 but soon discovers an alien species. It’s a familiar story with nothing new or interesting being added to it. In addition to that, the execution of said story felt very drawn out. This film is the directorial debut of Julian Glander, and I’m sorry to say that it shows. It feels as though this was meant to be a short film that the filmmaker chose to try to stretch out to an 86-minute runtime to qualify as a feature film.

Even the voice cast of the film felt very unconvincing. Most of the time, it sounded like the director got a bunch of his friends to do the voice acting who had no real voice acting experience. This was most apparent with the lead character. Most of the voice acting sounded monotone and therefore not very believable. There were even characters that sounded completely miscast where the voice doesn’t match the character at all. 

Overall, this was a tough movie to sit through. I feel as though it could find success on a free streaming site like Tubi or it could maybe find its audience on YouTube. But I honestly don’t see many people, let alone the average moviegoer, being able to sit through the entirety of this film. The animation style is not great, the voice acting is very unconvincing, and the story is far from unique or well-executed. I take no pleasure in tearing apart someone’s work. I personally know from experience how difficult animation can be and I know that someone put their hard work into this film and I applaud them for doing so, but this movie seriously tried my patience and therefore it simply isn’t a movie that I can in good conscience recommend to anyone.

1 star