Though he hasn’t been back in years, there are images seared in Julian Glander’s memory.

“I thought it was the most beautiful thing, the way the light hits it,” he said of the spaceship that rests atop the 2001 Odyssey strip club, a Tampa landmark he passed often long ago. “In my mind, it was kind of like, what if aliens did land here and the first things they saw were the things we actually see, like the gas station and the highway and the drained out strip malls that constitute our lives?”

A sort of humid, pastel-colored ennui flows through “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a surreal comedy that Glander wrote, directed and animated himself. The movie was inspired, in part, by that question about the aliens and other recollections from Glander’s teenage years growing up in Odessa, just outside of Tampa, where he attended Sickles High School in the early 2000s.

Through squeezable-looking digital animation, the movie captures the Florida paradox of intensely beautiful cotton candy skies over parking lots, mini marts and scowling, religious interstate billboards — recognizable to anyone who knows this region.

The film follows Billy 5000, a teenage gig worker hustling to make $5,000 doing food deliveries during the liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s. His quest is derailed when he becomes the caretaker of a small, donut-shaped creature.

The story originally was meant to take place on another planet. “As I kept writing and bringing my own life into it,” Glander said, “I found that Tampa is weirder than any sci-fi thing that you could come up with.”

To recapture the feelings of his youth, Glander, who now lives in Pittsburgh, revisited his old haunts via Google Street View. That included a Hillsborough County citrus grove where he’d occasionally stop atto pluck an illicit orange on his drive home from school.

On Google Maps he found the trees were now all gone.

“That pretty directly influenced the scene in the movie where Julio Torres’ character, T-bone, talks about what he would do if he won the lottery,” Glander said. “He basically talks about destroying this orange juice company but leaving all the trees.”

Glander, a 3D illustrator, has frequently published work in the New Yorker and the New York Times. He has worked with Adult Swim and created the cult video game “Art Sqool,” described as “an artistic fulfillment simulator.”

He made “Boys Go to Jupiter” over a period of three years on a shoestring budget of $30,000, his “life savings,” he said, which mostly went to studio recording time. The animation was done with Blender, the same free software used to craft “Flow,” which took home last year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Despite the small budget, Glander assembled a notable cast of alt-comedy stars including Sarah Sherman (“Saturday Night Live”), who plays Miss Sharon, Grace Kuhlenschmidt (“The Daily Show”), who plays an especially freckly teen and Cole Escola (Broadway’s “Oh, Mary”), as a pair of characters named Old Slippy and Nan.

Comic Joe Pera (Adult Swim’s “Joe Pera Talks With You”) plays the caretaker of a mini golf course very much inspired by Dinosaur World near Plant City.

Glander said he cast them mostly just by asking if they’d be in his movie through Instagram direct messages. It helped that he’d been friends with some of them over social media for years.

The lead, Billy 5000, is voicedby Jack Corbett, best known for hosting TikTok videos for the prestigious NPReconomics podcast Planet Money. Ironically, his character makes deliveries while compulsively listening to a different kind of money podcast, a rise-and-grind type of show about adopting a wealth-attracting mindset.

It feels very current. Glander said he could relate to the hypnotic pull that kind of ethos has on the modernyoung man.

“Yeah, I get pulled into that stuff,” he said. “I’m glad that I’m a little bit older because if these guys were around when I was like 15, I would have been all the way sucked in. The kind of fantasy fairy tales that these hustler get-rich guys sell you about how you can not just hustle your way to getting rich … but that there’s a sort of destiny, something mystical, about how we’re going to all get rich.”

In reality, he said, how much money a person makes is determined much more by “who we are when we’re born.” It’s one of the things, he said, that the Billy character has to learn.

That sounds like a heavy theme, but the movie is breezy, funny and strange — don’t miss Kuhlenschmidt’s character singing a hilariously heartfelt ode to eggs from atop a Florida bungalow.

“Boys Go to Jupiter” is currently available to buy or rent on demand through Amazon Prime Video.