Make Out Hill, the first animated feature inspired by the life and legacy of XXXTentacion, will tell the late rapper’s story without softening it, and that direction comes straight from his mother.
In an exclusive interview with Baller Alert, Love Jones and Carl Jones, the co-founders of the Black-owned animation studio Martian Blueberry, opened up about how the project came to them, why Cleopatra Bernard trusted them with her son’s story, and how they plan to bring X’s inner world to the screen.
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Love said the project was brought to the studio by someone who shared X’s love of anime and had a relationship with Cleo. Once the couple met her, they were all in.
“We just fell in love with her because she’s so amazing,” Love said. “How she tells his story with so much passion.”
What stood out most to Love was Cleo’s refusal to clean up her son’s image for the sake of a movie.
“The biggest thing I love, she wants to tell his story unapologetically,” Love said. “She knows who her son was. She doesn’t try to soften that. She was OK with us telling the story in its totality without trying to gloss over certain things.”
That stance matters for an artist whose life drew as much debate as his music did. Born Jahseh Onfroy, X built a massive following with raw, genre-bending records that spoke openly about depression, anger, and pain. He was shot and killed in Deerfield Beach, Florida, in June 2018. He was 20 years old.
For Love, the brevity of his life is the reason Make Out Hill exists.
“It’s an interesting small life that he led, and he had so much impact in the small time that he was here,” she said. “It feels like his fans got cheated in experiencing more of him, so this is a way to extend his legacy a little bit more.”
Carl, the creative force behind the animation, made it clear that fans should not expect a straight retelling of X’s life.
“We’re not doing a biopic,” Carl said. “We had the creative freedom to really tap into his whole entire ethos and do something that’s really cool and more anime inspired, because he was also a big anime head.”
Instead, Make Out Hill will play out as an anthology. Carl pointed to The Animatrix, the anime companion to The Matrix franchise that bundled separate short stories under one shared theme, each handled by a different animation director.
“We’re doing something that’s in that same spirit,” Carl said. “We looked at who he was, what his life was about, what his music represented, and we figured out a way to tell this story in an anthology film.”
That means multiple independent stories, each from its own director, all tied back to X. Carl believes the format will reach places traditional storytelling could not, including the 2022 documentary Look at Me, which traced X’s rise and death.
“It will speak to who X was in a way that the documentary couldn’t even do,” Carl said, “because we can take a more metaphorical approach and use a lot of allegories and things that are not so on the nose. We can delve a little deeper into some of the demons that he was battling emotionally, but in a very cool anime way.”
The official synopsis lines up with that vision. Make Out Hill follows a broken young soul moving through a series of connected fantasy worlds, searching for the lost pieces of his heart.
Carl knows this territory well. He served as co-executive producer on The Boondocks, the first Cartoon Network program to win a Peabody Award, and was executive producer, head writer, and director of Black Dynamite: The Animated Series on Adult Swim. Love, an actress turned producer, runs Martian Blueberry alongside him as co-founder and COO. Together, the studio has delivered Megan Thee Stallion’s anime-styled “Neva Play” video, MLB’s award-winning animated series Undeniable: Stories from the Negro Leagues, and work on Max’s Young Love.
The pair officially announced Make Out Hill at Dream Con 2026 on July 10 during a panel titled “From The Boondocks to Martian Blueberry.” The film is being developed in partnership with the XXXTentacion Estate and is currently in pre-production. Casting, first-look material, and a premiere date have not yet been revealed.
With Cleo’s blessing and Carl steering the creative, Make Out Hill is shaping up to be less about how X died and more about the war he fought inside himself while he was here.
