How 'Entergalactic' Described the Love Story Inside Kid Cudi's Head (and the Songs)

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When Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi asks you to create an animated New York for a TV special around his new album, you don't say no. But when Fletcher Moules was hired to direct "Entergalactic," there were only a handful of song demos and a three-page blueprint for a modern love story that would accompany a new Kid Cudi album. Still, there was enough to get the creative juices flowing. "I joined the team in the summer of 2019 and spent the second half of the first year painting New York," Moules told IndieWire. "Listening to the songs and reading the story that the writers room was finishing, I was able to spend time designing the city the way we wanted the characters to see it."

"Entergalactic" is far from the first visual album to debut on Netflix in recent years. In 2019 alone, the streamer released Sturgill Simpson's "Sound and Fury" as well as The Lonely Island's "The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience"; 2022 previously brought subscribers “Adam By EVE: A Live in Animation,” based on music by Japanese artist EVE. But where those projects were mostly music videos, "Entergalactic" leads with its narrative. Not that there's no music, of course, but the special also functions as a love story between two artists - Jabari (Mescudi) and her neighbor Meadow (Jessica Williams) - falling in love in New York.

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Where adult animation in the United States tends to focus on violence or comedy, "Entergalactic" is more of a drama with rom-com comedy tropes, something rare for the genre. "It was part of the original concept," Moules told IndieWire, "where you see characters conveying all kinds of emotions."

"The most important thing was to make sure the audience was in touch with the emotion of these characters, because it's a moving story," he said. "That's why I went for the very graphic art style - if we made it look illustrated, it suddenly puts us in a unique world with movements and expressions that you can relate to."

To highlight the performances and create that emotional connection, Moules and his team played with the frame rate. "I wanted it to feel handmade, to see the brush strokes on the faces and for the mouth shapes to feel like they were live with animation added in post-production," said he declared. To accomplish this, Jabari and Meadow's moves were often animated in twos and fours, with more imagery than most other characters to get the audience to connect with the two leads first and foremost. "You'll also notice that the people in the background are mostly just hand painted in 2D and then moved around in After Effects with the puppet tool," Moules said. "Then, as you get closer to the foreground, the frame rates on facial expressions and detail increase."

Indeed, the visuals are a big part of "Entergalactic," with its illustrated style reminiscent of the Oscar-winning "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." But it's also a special meant to accompany a new set of Kid Cudi songs, so it was paramount that each complement each other. Moules said he sought to do what visual albums and musical films of the past had not: "Beyoncé's 'Lemonade' wasn't very narrative, but Prince's 'Purple Rain' was." " The result isn't all that different from a standard rom-com with a soundtrack that plays for important emotional moments, only here the music drives both the story and the visuals themselves.

For the story, Mescudi started with the songs and worked backwards with a writing team to script the story based on the themes and lyrics of the music. From there, the animation team created the visual. As Moules says, often a song conjured images from the get-go, like the number "In Love," which marks the moment Jabari begins to fall in love with Meadow and shows her around town on a bicycle.