Critic Reviews

Whether you consider it to be a television special or a feature-length film, the classification matters less than how reflective it all becomes as a work of striking animation that finds beauty in the every day of adult life.

It's a stylish, colorful love letter to animation and the simplicity of Black love in the modern age. It feels like the lovechild between When Harry Met Sally and Spider-Verse for a Black demographic.

The fusion of music and narrative works wonderfully as we follow a group of well-drawn (in more ways than one), hilarious, likable and empathetic characters.

As an art piece, “Entergalactic” is evocative, beautiful, and smart. I can picture it playing at parties for decades to come. Just don’t approach it as a TV show.

A celebration of the delightful messiness of human connection in a world that would push you to isolate yourself lest you be hurt by those you most gravitate toward, this episodic story about boy-meets-girl finds new textures in an otherwise familiar story.

Think of it as a movie, because approached entirely as what it is on the surface, a low-key animated rom-com about two artists in New York, Entergalactic is a perfectly enjoyable, visually grabbing nugget of entertainment, with indeed a killer soundtrack that matches the vibes of the project.

Kid Cudi and Barris do a fine job of making Entergalactic feel like much more than a vehicle for Cudi’s latest music; it’s a hip hop take on a familiar story, but is a satisfying watch despite knowing how it’s going to turn out.

It plays like a feature, a sweet, corny and fairly adorable rom-com, temperamentally old-fashioned but made newfangled by virtue of being animated and the musical tie-in. ... If the characters do at times exhibit the expressiveness of the Sims, it’s visually appealing overall, with smart camera angles and framing and well-limned details.

There are sublime musical numbers, for lack of a better term, that let Mescudi’s music breathe and crank the visuals to 11. But the shifts between “Entergalactic’s” spacy elements and its grounded moments aren’t always smooth, another consequence of the series-to-special evolution. There’s much to love about Mescudi’s love story, except the fact that there isn’t more of it to love.

Perhaps the individual parts of Entergalactic might have been more effective if they’d been chopped up into individual music videos. Taken all together, however, they create a mind-numbing experience whose writing and visual stylings remain dispiritingly earthbound.