Kid Cudi stars in an animated film as Jabari, an upcoming artist in Manhattan. The film shares colorful aesthetics in line with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Great Pretender, capturing a whimsical and artistic New York. The film’s storytelling is well paced, allowing for a natural emotional rollercoaster filled with unique details. Covering themes of identity, modern dating, and growth, Entergalactic is a perfect fit for me.

The film has great attention to detail, exposing characters’ emotions with visual arts, music by Kid Cudi, and fantastic dialogue. The characters, especially Jabari, have incredible wardrobing by Virgil Abloh. Jabari’s imagination and the films lightly liberal interpretation of reality provide a kiss of magical realism, heightening the world immersion.

The film has beautiful transitions and animations. Sticking to a classic formula, Entergalactic‘s three act arc is well executed with beautiful art, music, and story keeping our attention every moment. The story is kept simple to allow for full exposure to the film’s world building. The voice acting and music by Kid Cudi, the beautiful animations, and the wardrobe by Virgil make this film an incredible pleasure to be immersed in and cannot be understated.

Doing light research on the film, Fletcher Moules directed it, having experience with a few animated films before this. Writers include Ian Edelman, experienced with American immigration storytelling, and Maurice Williams, multitalented entertainer with a focus on Black entertainment. As mentioned before Virgil Abloh plays a heavy stylistic role in this film, with his vision honored posthumously.

While the romantic comedy skeleton of this film is quite conservative and classic, the execution, detailing, and expression are phenomenal. I hope that Netflix continues its route of engaging talent directly and empowering artists like Kid Cudi to create special pieces like this one. There were certainly some artistic liberties and risks taken with this film and I’m sure there are dozens of Netflix films that failed to capture our attention. Don’t let this film get away, especially if you love animation, hip hop, or modern romance. A near perfect film, my only critique is to remaster the animation as some scenes have lower FPS, an understandable production cost or time save. Other than that, a classic I could enjoy again and again.