Music and visuals have had a long and legendary marriage, from orchestras accompanying great silent movies and Disney’s crazy symphonies from the 1930s, to the launch of MTV and recent YouTube videos. Like a true marriage, at its best, each medium compliments and enhances the other.
Musicians often push the boundaries when it comes to visual elements for their music, be it the iconic Beastie Boys music videos or the ‘visual album’ Lemonade from Beyonce. Now Scott’Kid CudicMescudi and a merry group of producers, animators and voice actors try to take it further with Entergalactica lovely feature length Netflix special that highlights Kid Cudi’s music with a story. Director Fletcher Moules, writers Maurice Williams and Ian Edelman, and their fellow executive producers Karina Manashil and Dennis Cummings spoke to MovieWeb about the project.
A Stacked Cast Brings Kid Cudi’s Music and Vision to Netflix
“Scott started with the music, so from the very beginning he had three songs that he presented,” Manashil said. “He had already seen how this could evolve into a narrative story. So when Kenya Barris partnered, he brought in the idea of animation, and from there it really unraveled, where the music led to this love story […] and the animation enveloped it, and it just became this ever-evolving vision where each side brought something different to the table.”
“Party” is definitely the right word; Kid Cudi has many creative friends in his rolodex, and many of them contribute to Entergalactic somehow creating the jovial feeling of a bunch of friends having fun on an artistic project. Apart from the producers and writers mentioned above, a very diverse group of people stars 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 has been some confusion about what to call Entergalactic, but at an hour and a half and as a standalone story, it’s fair to call it a movie. Nevertheless, it is 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 gaining recognition. He moved to Manhattan and lives with his two close friends (including a surprisingly hilarious Chalamet), meeting and falling for Meadow (Williams).
A simple love story from Kid Cudi
If that sounds easy, it’s because Entergalactic which is both surprising and refreshing. Despite the visually stunning animation, with its dazzling pastel and neon colors and occasionally swaying towards the surreal, the story is at the heart of Entergalactic is just a sweet, very real, modern love story. “We wanted to keep it grounded so people can really identify with it,” Dennis Cummings said, “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. “
“Essentially you still have to tell the story, which is a love story,” Manashil added. “There are things that are familiar – you want them to end together, love in New York City is a story 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 to see love at this point in life when you have matured they consider what love can really look like love that has a purpose and meaning but if we look at the animation style the orientation would be that story but the surreal color schemes, the scenes when you go into space – all of that is an opportunity to really express a visual identity of what love on that honeymoon is like.”
For writer/producer Maurice Williams, this apparent incongruity between grounded naturalism and surrealistic experimentation fits Kid Cudi’s music. “His music is all about honesty. It’s about simplicity, but it’s also very much about, I’ll do this, I’ll try, attitude. It’s very experimental. It’s like, keep it simple, keep it very relatable , and then try something weird.”
Animating the high stakes of first dates in Entergalactic
The imaginative animation in Entergalactic is a perfect channel to express those first few dates and weeks when you first meet someone you like. Everything is so new and fragile, with first impressions much heavier; if you say the wrong thing on a first date, it’s much more drastic than saying the same thing a year into a committed relationship. Oddly enough, the stakes are higher for these banal first moments, something Williams and director and animation specialist Fletcher Moules were well aware of.
“It’s a story that’s literally about that tumultuous time of meeting someone, where a wandering text message can ruin everything, or show up late for something, or miss a social cue or any of that that could just be that house of cards.” blow it up,” Willems said. “And I think that element really lends itself to the medium of animation, because we were able to heighten emotions that would need something bigger in live-action.”
“Obviously, we can make animations feel different pretty quickly,” Moules said, “and create a different language with color, shape, length and with lighting, and that’s something we want to do everywhere.”
“With Fletcher’s vision and our execution, we were able to achieve a simplicity in storytelling that you couldn’t do in live-action,” says writer/producer Ian Edelman. “This is about two people, but the animation makes falling in love look epic.”
After a lot of patience, Entergalactic is now on Netflix
As technology advances, perhaps more artists will follow in the footsteps of Kid Cudi, Donald Glover, Beyoncé and others, and long-playing visual albums will become more commonplace. “I think the way people consume music and art is changing,” Cummings says.
“I think the only minor caveat is the artists’ patience to do both,” Manashil added. “What was so interesting here is that the music Scott had written was created three years ago, so the idea is that he was holding this music back from waiting for the project to develop, and creating this moment where it was released simultaneously. I think what will determine how many people do this will ultimately be the ability to be patient for that process.”
In this digital world of instant gratification, patience is more than a virtue; it’s a sacred rarity, what 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.