Music and visuals have had a long and storied marriage, from orchestras accompanying great silent films and Disney’s Silly Symphonies of the 1930s, to the launch of MTV and recent YouTube videos. Like a real marriage, at its best, each medium compliments and strengthens the other.
Musicians frequently push the envelope when it comes to visual elements for their music, be it the iconic Beastie Boys music videos or the ‘visual album’ Lemonade from Beyoncé. Now, Scott ‘Kid Cudi’ Mescudi and a merry band of producers, animators, and voice actors are attempting to push it further with Entergalactic, a delightful feature-length Netflix special that highlights the music of Kid Cudi with a narrative. Director Fletcher Moules, writers Maurice Williams and Ian Edelman, and their fellow executive producers Karina Manashil and Dennis Cummings spoke with MovieWeb about the project.
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“Scott started with the music, so at its very inception, he had three songs he was presenting,” said Manashil. “He had seen already how this could expand into a narrative story. So when Kenya Barris came into partnering, he brought in the idea of animation, and it really unraveled from there, where the music led into this love story […] and the animation enveloped it, and it just became this ever-evolving vision where each party brought something different to the table.”
“Party” is certainly the right word; Kid Cudi has a lot of creative friends in his rolodex, and many of them contribute to Entergalactic in some way or another, creating this jovial feeling of a bunch of friends having fun on an artistic project. Aside from the aforementioned producers and writers, a very diverse group of people star as voice actors alongside Mescudi — Daily Show alum Jessica Williams, Timothée Chalamet, Ty Dolla $ign, Vanessa Hudgens, Macaulay Culkin, Jaden Smith, Keith David, Laura Harrier, and Luis Guzmán all show up.
There’s been some confusion over just what to call Entergalactic, but at an hour and a half and as a stand-alone story, it’s fair to call it a film. Nonetheless, it’s a unique project, part epic music video, part experimental animated film, and part Black love story. The film follows Cudi’s character Jabari, a visual artist who is finally getting some recognition. He moved to Manhattan and lives with his two close friends (including a surprisingly hilarious Chalamet), and meets and falls for Meadow (Williams).
A Simple Love Story From Kid Cudi
If that sounds simple, that’s because Entergalactic is, which is both surprising and refreshing. Despite the visually stunning animation, with its eye-popping pastels and neon colors and occasional swerves into the surreal, the narrative at the heart of Entergalactic is just a sweet, very real, modern love story. “We wanted to keep it grounded so that people can actually identify with it,” said Dennis Cummings, “because you might miss the mark if it’s too over the top. And New York is a grounded place. A lot of people are grounded in New York.”
“At its heart and soul, you still have to tell the story, which is a love story,” added Manashil. “There are things that are familiar — you want them to end up together, love in New York City is a tale as old as time, and so on. But there are also things that feel very new, which are modern love, Black love, and also this idea of seeing love at this point in life when you’ve settled down into adulthood. They’re considering what love can actually look like, love that has purpose and meaning. But when we look at the animation style, the groundedness is supposed to tell that story, but the surreal color schemes, the scenes when you go into outer space — all of that is an opportunity to really express a visual identity of what love at that honeymoon stage is like.”
For writer/producer Maurice Williams, this seeming incongruity between grounded naturalism and surreal experimentation is fitting with Kid Cudi’s music. “His music is all about honesty. It’s about simplicity, but it is very much also about, this I’ll do it, I’ll try it attitude. It’s very experimental. It’s like, keep it simple, keep it very relatable, and then also, try something weird.”
Animating the High Stakes of First Dates in Entergalactic
The imaginative animation in Entergalactic is a perfect conduit to express those first few dates and weeks when initially meeting someone you like. Everything is so new and vulnerable, with first impressions carrying much more weight; if you say the wrong thing on a first date, it’s much more drastic than saying the same thing a year into an established relationship. In a weird way, the stakes are higher for these banal first moments, something Williams and director and animation specialist Fletcher Moules were keenly aware of.
“It’s a story that’s literally just about that tumultuous time of just meeting someone, where an errant text message can ruin everything, or showing up late to something, or missing one social cue or any of that could just blow down that house of cards,” said Williams. “And I think that that element really lends itself to the medium of animation, because we were able to heighten emotions that, in live action, would have needed something bigger.”
“Obviously in animation, we can make something feel different pretty quickly,” said Moules, “and create a different language with color, shape, length, and with lighting, and that’s something that we aim to do throughout.”
“With Fletcher’s vision and our execution, we were able to achieve a simplicity in storytelling that you couldn’t do in live-action,” said writer/producer Ian Edelman. “This is about two people, but the animation makes falling in love look epic.”
After Much Patience, Entergalactic is Now on Netflix
As technology progresses, perhaps more artists will follow in the footsteps of Kid Cudi, Donald Glover, Beyoncé, and others, and feature-length visual albums will become more normal. “I think the way that people consume music and art is changing,” said Cummings.
“I think the one little caveat is the patience of the artists in order to do both,” added Manashil. “What was so interesting here is that the music Scott had written was done three years ago, so the idea is that he was holding back this music to wait for the project to develop, and create this moment of being released simultaneously. I think that what is going to determine how many people do this will be the ability, in the end, to be patient for that process.”
In this digital world of instant gratification, patience is more than a virtue; it’s a holy rarity, which makes Entergalactic a special anomaly in the audiovisual scene. Produced by Khalabo Ink Society, Netflix Animation, Mad Solar, and DNEG Animation, you can now stream Entergalactic on Netflix.
