Entergalactic (2022)

Entergalactic arrives as a Netflix special that is, by the admission of its own creator, also an album, also possibly a pilot, also a feature, depending on the tweet consulted. Kid Cudi built the songs first, then storyboarded around them, and the result is ninety minutes of drift through a New York that glows like a fever dream rendered by people who loved Spider-Verse. Jabari paints graffiti. Meadow photographs. They fall for each other across a hallway. This is the entire plot.

The notable achievement is casting. Adult animated romance has historically been a very white neighborhood, and this special fills its frame with Black performers: Cudi, Jessica Williams, Laura Harrier, Jaden Smith, Keith David, Ty Dolla Sign. Critics reached for the phrase love letter to Black love, and they were right to. The special centers Black romance and Black interiority without stopping to explain itself, which is the more interesting choice. There is no lecture. No character turns to the camera to instruct us on how to feel. The mood carries whatever message there is.

Meadow is a working photographer with a career and a spine, which earns a modest nod toward feminine agency, though the story stays a conventional will-they-won't-they. Jabari's anxiety about selling his graffiti to a comic publisher gestures at the artist's compromise and then drops the subject. No structural indictment follows. The special is content to be pretty, warm, and brief, and mostly it succeeds. It is a lovely object. It is also a little thin, and the fatigue that settles in at the end is not the fatigue of being scolded. Nobody scolds us here. That is a small mercy. It is dedicated to Virgil Abloh, and the dedication lands, which is more than most of these things manage.