Entergalactic (2022)
Entergalactic arrived in September 2022 as something fairly unusual in the animated film landscape: a feature released simultaneously with, and conceived as a companion to, a music album. Kid Cudi, the rapper and actor born Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi, developed the project over several years as a twin creative statement, and Netflix picked it up as an exclusive, giving it the kind of platform that allows a passion project to reach a wide audience without the pressure of a traditional theatrical run. The film sits somewhere between a visual album, a romantic comedy, and an animated feature proper, which is either an interesting formal experiment or an awkward straddle depending on your point of view. Manhattan is its setting, and it leans hard into a particular vision of the city: colourful, electric, the kind of New York where a working artist can afford a dream apartment and stumble into a meet-cute with their next-door neighbour. For a film also touching on the pressures of creative ambition and the cost of professional success, it is a recognisably warm-hearted premise, even if the city it depicts is more fantasy borough than postcode.
The film was directed by Fletcher Moules, a British director who had built a strong reputation in music video and commercial work before this feature, and the connection to that world is evident in how the film handles its visual grammar. The screenplay was written by Ian Edelman, Maurice Williams, and Judnick Mayard, a collaborative arrangement that reflects the project's origins across several creative conversations. Production was handled by Khalabo Ink Society and Mad Solar, with the animation itself produced by DNEG, the London-based visual effects and animation company that has become one of the most ambitious outfits working in the field. DNEG's fingerprints are on some visually ambitious recent animation, and they clearly had licence here to push the style as far as it would go. The animation draws freely on comic-book aesthetics: halftone dots, bold outlines, frozen frames that read almost like panels, and a colour palette that pulses with the confidence of a well-designed record sleeve. Kid Cudi himself voices the lead, Jabari, a street artist whose professional life is taking off just as his personal life grows complicated. Jessica Williams voices Meadow, the photographer next door at the centre of the romance, while Laura Harrier, Ty Dolla Sign, and Timothée Chalamet fill out a supporting cast that reads like a particularly well-curated playlist. It is a polished but unremarkable ensemble in terms of screen time, with the film's romantic focus keeping most of the attention on its two leads.
On the craft side, the score and sound design are the work of producers Plain Pat and Dot Da Genius, both longstanding collaborators of Cudi, which gives the whole film a coherent sonic identity. Plain Pat, in particular, has been part of Cudi's creative circle since the very beginning, and that familiarity comes through in how naturally the music sits against the images rather than being applied on top of them. The cutting was handled by editor Carole Kravetz Aykanian, and for a film this reliant on mood and rhythm, the editorial choices carry real weight: how long a beat lingers, when the film holds on a single image, how the cuts land against the music. At ninety-three minutes the film is not long by any measure, though pacing, as ever, is a matter of momentum rather than minutes. Visually, without a named cinematographer to credit (animation pipelines being what they are), the look is the collective product of the animation team and Moules's direction, and it is a genuinely distinctive one. Whether that look is in service of the story it is wrapped around is, of course, the question worth asking. Those interested in animated films doing interesting things with New York might also find themselves reaching for Tendaberry, a very different film but one equally preoccupied with the city's emotional geography.
Entergalactic arrived as a companion piece to Kid Cudi's album of the same name, and you can feel those origins in every frame: this is, first and last, a gorgeous thing to look at, a mood and a soundtrack given ninety minutes of animated shape.
Directed by Fletcher Moules and built around Cudi's own voice work as Jabari, a New York street artist falling for Meadow, the photographer next door, it is a grown-up animated romance with real visual ambition. The snag is that the ambition lives almost entirely on the surface.
The debt to the Spider-Verse films, meanwhile, is impossible to ignore. Entergalactic borrows their comic-book textures, their kinetic bounce, that same knack of making a frozen frame look like a page you would happily pin to the wall, and it never comes within touching distance of them.
Into the Spider-Verse and its sequel, both of which I rated among the best animation going, wed that style to storytelling of real heart and invention; Entergalactic has the look and none of the engine. As a romance it is perfectly pleasant and little more, a likeable couple and a familiar will-they-won't-they, nothing that stays with you once it is over. The soundtrack is good, as you would hope from a Kid Cudi project, but even that never quite takes off.
And for something this slight, it drags. A tighter, sharper cut might have made a lovely ninety-minute hang of it; instead it outstays its welcome, coasting on its own gloss well past the point where the story has run dry. That is the nub of it: a middling rom-com dressed in first-rate visuals, and no amount of style can carry a film this thin. The eyes are well served; the rest of me drifted. Two and a half stars, then, for a film that looks a good deal more special than it plays.
Entergalactic is a film that will likely find its most comfortable home as background viewing: something you put on, let wash over you, and enjoy for its surface pleasures without demanding too much in return. That is not nothing, and fans of Kid Cudi's music will find it an agreeable extension of the album's world. For those approaching it as straight animation or as a romance, the calculus is trickier. Animated films with real ambitions for their genre, such as the kind reviewed here when Macca looked at The Gruffalo, tend to earn their warmth through economy and precision. Entergalactic's style is genuinely worth seeing, but style, in the end, is only the wrapping. There is something almost poignant about a film this beautiful having so little to say with its beauty.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-08-17
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Entergalactic (2022) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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