If you’re going to release a new album paired with a Netflix film, you’d want it to look like Entergalactic.
The visual side to Scott « Kid Cudi » Mescudi’s latest album of the same name, Entergalactic is not only an extension of the themes, scenes, and inspirations from the record, it’s one of the most impressive animated films from Netflix this year. Mescudi worked with director Fletcher Moules, executive producer Kenya Barris, and writers Maurice Williams and Ian Edelman to bring his concept album to life as a restrained but heartfelt romantic comedy set in New York City.
Over several chapters, Entergalactic follows artist Jabari (voiced by Mescudi), who spends time hanging out with his friends Jimmy and Ky (Timothée Chalamet and Tyrone Griffin Jr.) while trying to make a name for himself. Then, he meets his neighbour, photographer Meadow (Jessica Williams), through a too-loud party meet-cute. When she’s not being pummelled with advice from her own best friend Karina (Vanessa Hudgens), she’s also trying to establish herself in the high-flying New York art world. And yes, a sweet, modern love story ensues.
With production designer Robh Ruppel at the helm and thanks to the talents of visual effects and animation studio DNEG, the animation in Entergalactic is probably like nothing you’ve seen before. The closest you might have would be Spiderman: Enter the Spiderverse or Arcane. It’s a technical triumph. Each frame is a masterpiece of hypercolour, clashing textures, and vignettes of city life — watching Jabari ride through the Manhattan streets eating sloppy noodles at sunset is simply beautiful to watch. This pristine animation also thrives through moments of surrealism: Instagram profile pictures come to life, Jabari’s street art character Mr Rager (Keith David) tries to give him advice, and weed propels characters through stunning, otherworldly, dreamlike sequences.
Cudi and Moules even worked on the costume design with late Louis Vuitton artistic director Virgil Abloh, who died at the age of 41 in late 2021 from cancer. According to Netflix, Abloh based the outfits on his own runway designs and wardrobe favourites, and the production team incorporated these into the animation.
Mashable spoke to director Moules about how the animation in Entergalactic came together.
Mashable: The animation in Entergalactic is unlike anything I’ve seen on screen. For someone who knows little of the technical terms for this style of animation, why does the film look like nothing we’ve seen before, both seemingly handpainted and computer animated?
Fletcher Moules: Although we used common 3D animation tools (Photoshop, Maya, Nuke) my main goal was to hide the computer’s role as much as possible. Entergalactic had to look like a moving painting. Writers Ian Edelman and Maurice Williams dubbed the show an »analogue love story ». So for me it was imperative that the film look and feel handmade. Entergalactic is about two artists after all. When a musician releases an album they’re putting themselves out there, creating an emotional response; love it or hate it like any piece of art. I felt like the visual component had to be the same.
Technically to achieve this, we handpainted everything. All the textures and color maps on the characters are individually painted in Photoshop. Production designer Robh Ruppel was instrumental in guiding this all the way through production. One example is that the highlights on their skin are brush strokes. Normally the computer gives you a layer that’s a soft highlight. Working with the VFX team at DNEG, we wrote bespoke tools that put a brushstroke there instead. This thinking carried all the way through the show.
The second element here is the movement. Entergalactic is a love story between two humans — nothing’s more relatable than that. So our lead characters had to emote in a believable manner. Following the same handmade mantra, every pose had to be hand positioned by every animator, like in stop motion, not enabling the computer to fill in frames. No motion capture either. It was a risk, especially on our super fast schedule. Animation might be more choppy than what people are used to, but what’s more important to me was that the human hand was literally guiding every movement, every expression. The animated team at DNEG really killed it here!
How did you work with Kid Cudi to ensure the story of Entergalactic could stand on its own outside the tracks of the album?
To be honest, without those songs it wouldn’t be the same story! Cudi had the songs first, which is pretty different for any feature length project. He also had the concept of a love story set in Manhattan. The songs set the tone when writers Ian and Maurice got underway. They were able to take the tracks and build the main emotional beats and arcs around them, only in a few cases was it the other way around. The songs were immediately so captivating, and to me, evoked a world I just wanted to swim in.
How did your team produce such an authentic, accurate vision of New York City in the film, can you speak about the sense of place the film conveys?
Writers Ian and Maurice are both New Yorkers so they kept us honest! The three of us went on a scouting trip in late 2019, which was really more of a bonding trip, ha! We walked all the locations we were thinking the show would take place as I was shooting thousands of reference photos. Little did we know that COVID was right around the corner and that trip would be so pivotal to the show!
It was imperative for Cudi from the start that we were making a show truly authentic to NYC, and a love letter to the city. Narratively we open with Jabari just moving to Manhattan. He just got his dream job and dream apartment, so culturally, socially, emotionally, we wanted to convey his new lifestyle onscreen.
Geographically I love it when a NY film picks a building to center around, it’s a fun visual maker throughout the story. I love the Jenga building (56 Leonard St) and it’s right in the pocket of where the writing team wanted Jabari to live. So we used that as the landmark you constantly see throughout.
Surrealism and psychedelic sequences make up several scenes in the film, can you tell me anything about how your team came up with the concepts here?
We started painting graphic space scenes as a reaction to hearing the music and really just to visualize the show title, but then it became something much bigger. Pretty quickly we realised that we needed a visual device to convey Jabari’s emotional POV. To me, that’s the joy of animation. You can bend reality, totally change it, and it doesn’t throw the viewer off because they are already in a made up place, no matter how grounded the story may be. Each of the different visual styles in the show are designed to either convey a different POV or to give much clearer insight to the audience of how a character is feeling.
It’s never easy to animate physical intimacy with believability and beauty onscreen, how did you navigate these sequences?
Ha! Well I hope we pulled them off OK! Firstly, they are not intended to make the viewer uncomfortable, but to instead further the realistic/relatable story we are telling. We approached them by starting with a single painting with thoughtful lighting, and dropped those stills into the edit to check if it would work.
Once we felt they would, we carefully moved into animation… ensuring all movements were minimal, suggestive and never exaggerated! I tip my hat to the great animators at DNEG who executed those shots!
