“Entergalactic is something that we worked on for three years,” Scott said in a Netflix interview. “And we put a lot of love and a lot of heart and hard work into it.” The artist explained to The Wrap on Sept. 30 how he carefully worked on both the visuals and music of Entergalactic to make the two cohesive, yet also unique from visual albums of the past. “The music element was always a part of it in the first place and this was more so, ‘How can I bring the visual and the music and marry the two and it just be the perfect thing, and it not be like what we’ve seen before, like a visual album?’” Scott said. “You’ve never seen animation like this,” Kenya said of Entergalactic during a Breakfast Club interview on Sept. 28. “It’s the first time an album and a show have ever dropped at the same time. And each track on the album represents a chapter in the show. There’s Easter eggs in it, and I really feel like this is a different swing for us.” “Virgil has been a huge inspiration for me,” Scott said in a Netflix clip. “And when it came time to do Entergalactic, I knew that, in order for us to have the freshness, I knew I had to hire someone who was just focused on wardrobe. And who fresher than Virgil?” “That was such a huge deal because [Virgil is] just culturally so seismic,” executive producer and writer Maurice Williams added. “He was so gracious and so caring.” Virgil sadly passed away from cancer in 2021. Scott honored Virgil with the release of Entergalactic on Sept. 30, which was also Virgil’s birthday. “It’s Virgil Abloh’s Birthday today. I miss my brother so so much,” Scott wrote on Twitter. “Entergalactic is for you big bro. We did it Virg. We did it Happy Birthday V.” “I think it’s the same thing that you would want from the best of our romantic comedies, like Harry Met Sally. The idea that love is flawed and characters are flawed and people are flawed but overall if you lean in, it might sound saccharine, love can conquer all,” Kenya told Complex on Sept. 30. “But you have to be willing to have some growth and some arc. It’s a really hard time to be young and in a relationship, to just be in this world in general. It’s a really hard time when you’re trying to make your career, everyone has to be successful, younger than ever. Sometimes you have to leave those things behind in the backdrop and focus on what’s important, and what’s important is that relationship. That’s what we really want and hope people take is that sometimes you find your person, and you got to fight for them,” he added. “From the minute that [Scott] played those songs, it was just like an activation,” Maurice said, per Netflix. “Like, ‘Oh. There is something special here.’” “I love listening to an entire album beginning to end,” Vanessa Hudgens added. “And to see how that was developed into Entergalactic, I was like, ‘That is the coolest, coolest thing ever.’” “I felt like these things, … the culture, the art, the music, all these things were something that we haven’t seen in animation, and I just really wanted to do something new and something that people haven’t done before,” Scott said to Collider on Oct. 1. “Because I was at this place as an artist where I was getting bored with the same old thing, recording an album, dropping two music videos, and then that’d be it. And I just was thinking about, ‘How could I do something bigger and give people a new experience?’ And yeah, this show was the perfect thing for me at the time.” The performer realized that Entergalactic was the right fit for his first animated production due to its exploration of the universal theme of love. “I’ve just been trying to figure out what I could do differently that hadn’t already been done before,” he added. “It was really just about, ‘How can I find a story that everybody can connect to?’ Once I figured out that love was the key tone, everything kind of flowed together.” “The first time I watched Entergalactic, I cried at the end,” Scott said in his EW interview. “And look, I know what the show’s about: I’ve read every script, I’m in the show, I know how it ends. But it was still so powerful that it moved me, man. That’s the shit you want to do. You want to make some powerful shit. I know that’s going to touch people, in the same way that it touched me, if not more so.” The rom-com has a happy conclusion that will remind viewers that, no matter their relationship history, love can always still be in the cards for them. “I’ve attempted to be in a relationship over the past few years and it hasn’t worked out,” Scott added. “… This story could be someone’s reality: People could find each other and it could be perfect. It could be my reality one day. A lot of this is what I hope for in my own life. That’s where a lot of the inspiration came from.” “The number one thing was to make sure the audience connected with the emotion of those characters because it is an emotional story,” Fletcher told IndieWire on Sept. 30. “It’s why I went to the very graphic art style — if we made it look illustrated then it suddenly places us into a unique world with movement and expressions you can relate to.” The director added that he designed the animated rom-com “to feel handmade, to see the brushstrokes on the faces, and for the mouth shapes to feel like they were live-action with some animation added in post-production.” Scott has stated how Fletcher’s involvement in this journey was “key” to capturing the right look for the characters and their environment. “Meeting up with Fletch, you know, he was key,” Scott said to ComingSoon. “Finding exactly what I wanted with the animation, and we went back and forth for months, just trying to get it right. And he was a really big help. The first mock-up that he did of the character was pretty much spot-on.” “One thing that I do understand is that whether me and Timmy are friends or not, he’s not about to do some shit just because. So it needed to be dope,” Scott said to BuzzFeed on Sept. 30. “And it needed to be something that made sense for him to do. After he read the script, he said, ‘Yo, this is fire. I fuck with this.’ I was relieved. I was like, ‘Okay, he truly fucks with this.’” “It means a lot to me. The fact that he, Jessica [Williams], Laura [Harrier], Vanessa [Hudgens], and Macaulay [Culkin] all wanted to do this … I’m like, ‘Man, this is my idea and they fuck with my idea.’ It’s super humbling,” he added. “What we are aiming to do here exactly is not a genre. We’re using animation, our medium, to make something that happens to be the right way to tell this love story, and to put the music into this love story, to visualize,” Fletcher said before adding, “I hope there is more of this, and I hope Entergalactic can be a beacon in the rest of the industry, where we’re able to see more of this work out there, [and] it doesn’t need to be led by large family content or a superhero attached.” “Just to speak to the eyeliner community: I’ve been a fan of wearing black eyeliner and then just a little bit of blue on the top since high school,” Jessica said, via Netflix Tudum. “I really appreciate that the animators took time to study my face. That was actually a very personal thing that made it into this gigantic project.” “What I love most about this story is just seeing these two really funny, warm people fall in love,” Jessica told Entertainment Tonight Canada. “I really love the environment. I feel like Vanessa and Laura and Ty, … everybody’s really funny and really just lovely in it. I just think it’s funny also, and I’m really into how well the jokes play.” “Love is the easiest thing in the world when it happens by accident, but it doesn’t get real until you do it on purpose,” she says.
