Entergalactic · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film's most loving camera moves are spent on a wall.

Jabari has just moved into the Manhattan apartment he's been chasing, and Entergalactic takes its time with what's in it. The records. The comics and the streetwear. The sneakers, the desk, his own drawings pinned up. Production design is doing the job dialogue usually does: we know him through his objects well before he explains himself to anybody.

Deleuze has a name for that bond, and it comes from a kind of movie this one otherwise wants nothing to do with. In the classical action picture, milieu and character imprint each other. The desert makes the cowboy, and the cowboy's body carries the desert. But the imprint in that tradition is pressure: the milieu builds until somebody has to act, and the act changes the situation. Entergalactic keeps the imprint and quietly discards the second half. Nobody has to do anything about the room. The room is simply true.

Which sharpens the complaint the film usually gets. If the plot is this slender — neighbor meets neighbor, an ex intrudes, ambition intrudes, feelings eventually get admitted — then what is actually moving?

The songs are.

Deleuze noticed something in the Hollywood musical that turns out to be the exact mechanism at work here. At a certain point in a number, dancing stops being something the character does and becomes something the world does through them. The figure goes passive as an agent. It no longer decides, no longer solves anything. The world takes over the movement and carries the body along inside it. Deleuze calls this the movement of world, and he treats it as one of the places where classical cinema slipped out of its own action machinery without anyone thinking to call it experimental.

Entergalactic runs that mechanism at feature length. A walk across the city, a first date, a stretch of work at the drawing desk: a Cudi track comes up, the virtual camera stops moving functionally and starts moving lyrically, and the cut hands its authority over from scene-to-scene dramaturgy to the album's sequencing. Jabari isn't driving those passages. The block is. The record is.

That's the lens, and here's the case for it. "The story is thin" is an accurate observation and a slightly misaimed complaint, because the film has relocated its motion rather than lost it. The clock it runs on is the tracklist. Be fair about the cost, though. The movement of world only pays off when the world genuinely moves, and where this film sags, it's because a passage has been handed over to a song that the images aren't answering. Deleuze names the strategy. He doesn't guarantee the execution.

Running alongside is a great deal of what he calls dead time: stretches where the everyday is held and nothing advances. In his vocabulary that's praise, not diagnosis. Dead time is where duration becomes something you can see instead of something plot spends.

Colour does most of the psychological labour. Deleuze separates colour that decorates a scene from colour that absorbs it — a hue so total that the scene has no feeling left over that isn't already in the palette. Entergalactic is close to a pure case. Night interiors go neon, exteriors go golden-hour, light keys to emotional temperature rather than to any plausible source, and the palette shifts track the arc of the romance more reliably than the dialogue does. You could follow this love story with the sound off, from hue alone.

Then there's the surface itself. In Cinema 1 Deleuze makes a small, sharp observation about animation: the cartoon doesn't hand us a figure caught at a privileged moment, it hands us the continuous movement that describes the figure. The drawing is always in the act of drawing itself. Most animation works hard to hide this. Entergalactic makes it the whole proposition. It runs on the pipeline Into the Spider-Verse legitimized: Ben-Day halftone dots, hand-inked line overlays, chromatic-aberration offset left deliberately in the out-of-focus planes, characters animated on twos so the motion carries a hand's cadence instead of a machine's. You are watching an illustration in the process of describing a person. And then, repeatedly, the film stops and flattens. Characters and signage arrange themselves into a poster, a near-abstract graphic held for a beat. That's the older category, the privileged instant, the posed and stylized form. The film breathes between the two.

One structural oddity is worth naming. The album came out the same day. That makes the soundtrack a self-standing object with its own life rather than a score written to picture, and the songs carry emotional exposition the dialogue never attempts. Writing about far more radical filmmakers, Deleuze describes sound and image becoming two autonomous wholes that touch only across an interstice. This is the gentle version. Nobody's voice is severed from their body here. But the relation between the record and the film really is two complete things set side by side, which is not how a score behaves, and it's why the movie keeps feeling accompanied rather than underscored.

Cudi is also doing something to himself in it. He voices an illustrator whose comic character is being adapted for television, which is a fairly transparent doubling of a musician turning his record into a film. Deleuze's word for a subject caught in the act of inventing a version of himself is fabulation, legending. Entergalactic legends its author twice over, and it inherits that artist-avatar directly from Runaway, where the musician first put himself on screen as a figure in a designed art-world.

The other debts are just as specific. Interstella 5555 cut a wordless feature one-to-one against a Daft Punk record and proved that song sequencing could replace dialogue as an edit's engine. Lemonade codified the prestige visual album, discrete songs stitched by connective material into a single authored event. Black Is King pushed that toward narrative and made production-design-as-characterization work at scale. American Pop had already shown that adult urban animation could run its emotional spine through pop songs rather than plot beats.

What Entergalactic does with the inheritance is the argument for it. The Spider-Verse pipeline was engineered for kinetic spectacle, bodies flung through impossible space. This film points the same apparatus at two people deciding whether to be honest with each other. Halftone and ink, on a conversation. Animation used for the plainly ordinary, with no flight and no transformation, at feature length, on a streamer, with an album for a skeleton. That combination didn't exist before.

What it seeded is honestly still arriving. The door it left standing open is an adult animated cinema that takes its structure from records instead of screenplays, and that's a real offer, whoever picks it up.

So: next time, watch for the moment the cut changes allegiance. A song comes in, the camera stops answering to the scene, and the city starts doing the moving. Ask who's actually in motion. Usually not Jabari. He's being carried, which is more or less what falling for someone feels like anyway.