The romantic comedy is tried-and-true. Certain tropes like meet-cute and misunderstandings are hallowed ground. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to breathe new life into the genre. Case in point: Entergalactic.
This adult animated story follows street artist Jabari and photographer Meadow, twenty-somethings living in New York City, as they, yes, meet-cute, and then navigate their feelings for one another. Creators and Executive Producers Kenya Barris and Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi both call Entergalactic a Black love story, but Maurice Williams, also an Executive Producer and the film’s writer along with Ian Edelman, says that the storyline itself was not approached as such.
“It’s a rom-com, it should feel warm and loving, and I wanted to make sure that the artist’s hand was on the screen the whole time”—Fletcher Moules
The focus, he says, was on “that trepidatious period in the beginning of relationships where one false move and maybe the rest of your life could be over tomorrow. That’s something we can all identify with.”
While it was important for the filmmakers to highlight the absence of love stories with Black characters onscreen, and to have the two leads be brown skinned without “any apologies or caveats … the idea was that there was never a flashlight on who these people were racially,” Williams says. “Love is colorless. There is a yearning to see ourselves in that light, [but] it’s not different. There is no creative difference. There is no inception difference. It really is about the idea of being able to execute something authentic.”
“Maurice wanted to write a very real, very relatable love story. Very grounded. Very now,” says Director Fletcher Moules.
One of the ways Moules approached this visually was to embrace imperfection because he believes this is an element of authenticity. “It’s a rom-com, it should feel warm and loving, and I wanted to make sure that the artist’s hand was on the screen the whole time,” he says. He and his team used tools that projected brushstrokes so everything from the background to the highlights on a character’s face looks hand painted.
Pacing was also used to capture the human element of the story. “In a lot of my favorite live-action dramas and rom-coms, you have a beat to see the main character just being introspective. You rarely see it in animation,” says Moules. “In a lot of [our] scenes there’s two people talking about very relatable things.” To capture the emotional resonance of these interactions, step animation was used. “What’s the key pose for this line,” he says, “and what’s the reaction pose? Then what’s the reaction pose back from that. We’d animate every scene just from a key pose to the next pose to the next pose. And then fill the frames in until we had enough.”
“When [Entergalactic] is over, you turn it off and you see the real world and you think, man, I wish [it] would slow down a little bit,” says Williams.
“The big thing is that these two best friends are falling in love. The small things are how they’re doing it, and that makes the story feel authentic.”
—Maurice Williams
Underscoring the whole production was the music—the inspiration for the film in the first place. Entergalactic was conceived to support an album by Kid Cudi, which made for a unique process. “In the writer’s room, I would normally throw out some index cards and say I want [the characters] to be here by this time and here by this time,” says Williams. “[But] I didn’t have to do that because I know where they’re going to be because we’re shaping it around these big musical moments.”
“For me as a director,” says Moules, “when the writers’ room was going, I probably had four or five songs.” He knew roughly what direction the movie was taking because they were making a rom-com, and the music allowed him to visualize and feel scenes at a very early stage.
Was it a challenge working from the music first? Williams says no. “It was never a point where it was like, hmm, this is really limiting from a story standpoint. Because the music, the songs are such earworms of emotion. You can remember how you felt when you heard them. [They] became tentpoles in the storytelling,” he says.
With these tentpoles as a guide, the filmmakers explored the verisimilitude necessary “to make sure that the small things add up to the big things. I think that’s where authenticity really exists,” says Williams. They studied films like When Harry Met Sally. “The big thing is that these two best friends are falling in love,” Williams says. “The small things are how they’re doing it, and that makes the story feel authentic. It’s the small things about When Harry Met Sally that make us realize how great of a love story it is for the time in which it existed.”
Entergalactic is also inspired by Kid Cudi’s time spent living in TriBeCa, and the team was intentional in capturing real locations, from street corners to bars. They would also discuss the tiniest details, down to what would happen if Jabari wore glasses or if he didn’t. “Those small choices started to make a brand-new character,” says Williams, adding, “It was even more important for Meadow because of the vastness of the beauty of, not just women in general, but Black women. There are various ways in which they can come across onscreen.” They discussed everything from how she wore her hair to sleep to how she wore her hair on special occasions. “Her look started to define the character and the character defined the look,” he adds.
While a great many of the movie’s details are specific to Black culture, and “that authenticity will obviously have markers and things that ring true to certain people more than others, that’s not the point,” Williams says. “The point is that it rings true on a human level.”
