Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic owes more to Beyoncé than Spider-Verse

polygon.com:

Entergalactic, the new animated limited series from executive producers Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi and Black-ish creator Kenya Barris, premiered on Netflix last Friday. The 90-minute animated special stars Mescudi as Jabari, a charming street artist who meets and falls in love with his neighbor, Meadow (Jessica Williams), an up-and-coming photographer.

Entergalactic’sstorylands somewhere between High Fidelity, Someone Great, and How To Make It in America (which Mescudi starred in). What sets Entergalactic apart is the way in which it tells its story through animation. The special has an eye-popping look, with strong character designs accented by striking colors and bold silhouettes.

Entergalactic serves as a visual accompaniment to Kid Cudi’s album of the same name. Talking to Polygon over Zoom, director Fletcher Moules cited visual albums like 2016’s Beyoncé: Lemonade and Albert Magnoli’s rock musical drama Purple Rain as principal influences on the special’s production.

“Those were huge jumping-off points for Entergalactic,” Moules says. “Often in visual album releases, you have the narrative chasing the music. And so we were all very much on board at the start to make Entergalactic something where it was obviously a musical album, but the narrative and the characters were as strong as any other show. We looked at other musical visual releases, but used television as a format to really let the narrative drive the project as a whole.”

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the 2018 Oscar-winning animated film executive produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, was a common point of comparison made by fans and journalists when the first trailer for Entergalactic was released in June. While Moules is flattered by the