Kid Cudi’s Animated Album of Love Songs

Entergalactic’s EP Karina Manashil and director Fletcher Moules detail how the Netflix rom-com special expanded Kid Cudi’s sonic storytelling

Entergalactic EP Karina Manashil and director Fletcher Moules detail how the Netflix rom-com special expanded his sonic storytelling.

For Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi, known professionally as Kid Cudi, Netflix’s animated music special Entergalactic offered more than just the opportunity to create visuals for his 2022 studio album of the same name. It was a break, says executive producer Karina Manashil, from the traditional process of a label giving an artist “two music videos, and you have to move on to the next.” Created by Mescudi and Kenya Barris, Entergalactic is a New York-set rom-com-style story with a painterly visual style that follows an artist named Jabari (voiced by Mescudi) as he attempts to balance his career and love with “It” girl Meadow (voiced by Jessica Williams).

“Creating Entergalactic the [show] actually unlocked something for Kid Cudi, the artist,” says Manashil. “There’s often an expectation of the sound your fans want to hear, and the more you put out, the more specificity they have about what they want to listen to next. This gave him license to do something sonically that I don’t know he necessarily could have done.”

But Entergalactic — which is Emmy-nominated for outstanding animated program — didn’t just shake up Kid Cudi’s relationship with his music and fans. It was a new creative endeavor for the Grammy-winning mind behind hits “Pursuit of Happiness” and “Day ’N’ Nite” that resulted in an animated adult-aimed rom-com, not typical in Western animation — making the special “instantly … unique,” says director Fletcher Moules.

“Scott wanted to write an album of love songs, which he hadn’t done before,” Moules explains. “It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s do something that’s never been done before,’ it’s more just

what Entergalactic was. It was a very natural move to become a rom-com.”

Manashil adds that the traditions of a love story allowed for the sights and sounds to pop: “[That] familiarity created an easy barrier of entry, which allowed the visuals and the music — or even the fact that it’s a Black love story — to be elevated, to really shine. The story’s simplicity meant that everything else had room to be as big as possible.”

Conceived alongside Kudi’s 45-minute album, the special also reworked some aspects of the traditional animation production pipeline, with the team taking three completed songs to Netflix before the special was written and storyboarded around the rest of the album. Sitting with Mescudi in EastWest Studios, Moules, Manashil and the rest of the Entergalactic team wrote out scenes on a whiteboard, with the plotting of each song in the larger story. Of the pacing, Moules says, “I wanted to make sure that it felt like there was room to breathe, that these characters were real. There are a lot of shots and sequences onscreen that are much longer than you would traditionally see in an animated show.”

Manashil credits Moules for capturing an authenticity in New York’s cityscape, characters’ fashions and even Mescudi’s own creative spirit through elements like Entergalactic’s color choices, which audiences might not “necessarily expect, but they’re so indicative of who the artist is.”

Says Moules, “When an artist puts out an album, they’re expressing themselves musically, so I wanted to make sure that the visuals were there to sync hand in hand with the music.” He adds that textures and highlights were painted in Photoshop with the intention of making the animation “feel very handmade, very expressive in the same way [as] the music.”

The Netflix release, which debuted in September 2022, gave the rapper, singer and songwriter a chance to venture into a “really special medium,” says Manashil, in a way that ultimately surprised even him.

“At the end of it, Scott was really emotional and started crying,” the executive producer recalls. “He said, ‘I never believed that an idea that sits up here (points to head) could touch so many hands. It was hundreds of people all over the world, through COVID and three years of effort. All those hands were working in sync across so many different people to become even bigger than what I had imagined.’ ”

Netflix’s Entergalactic, which features the voices of Emmy nominee Jessica Williams as Meadow (left) and Kid Cudi as Jabari.