Movie Mondays: Interstella 5555

Hey, this isn’t The Incredibles. Yeah, I decided to shake things up a bit and review something completely different because of something that recently happened. Daft Punk, the seminal French electronic music duo has decided to split up after 28 years of performing together. While the exact reason for the break-up hasn’t been given at the time of this writing, my personal theory is that the duo is just done making music. They've had their fun and they want to ride off into the sunset, which they have absolutely earned. Despite only releasing 4 studio albums in their nearly 30 year-long career, they’ve had a bigger influence on the music industry than more acts do with triple that amount. Quality always beats out quantity as they say.

I’ve been a fan of Daft Punk ever since I was a kid. I remember my introduction to them was an old sprite cartoon on Newgrounds for the song “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”. The video isn’t great, but I loved the song, I replayed it over and over again just to listen to it because I loved it so much. I never owned any of their albums, not much of an album guy personally, though I would enjoy one of their songs whenever one came on the radio. As I got older, I did eventually listen to their albums and found a new appreciation for their music.

But this isn’t a music review, so why am I talking about a music duo. Well, like a lot of other musicians, Daft Punk have dabbled in the world of cinema. Probably the most well-known of the duo’s cinematic outings is them composing the soundtrack to Tron Legacy, which I haven’t seen but will maybe look at some time in the future. But that was just doing soundtrack work, in terms of films the two had a bigger hand in developing there was the live action film Electroma, a clip of which was used for the duos goodbye message, and the film we’re looking at today. The oddly named, Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ytem.

What the hell is this movie you ask, other than being a contender for the goofiest name in cinematic history. Well, it’s not exactly what you would call traditional. The idea for the movie is that it’s meant to be a visual companion piece to the album Discovery. The idea of turning an album into a movie isn’t a new one. Films like Tommy and The Wall proved that it could be done very well. But those were concept albums, aka albums that told a story, Discovery isn’t. It is a concept album but more in a vague thematic sense. It doesn’t tell a story, it’s more like a reflection of Daft Punk growing up with the music of the 70’s and 80’s. How do you turn that into a movie with an actual plot?

Better yet, who would tackle such a production? Why the absolute kings of producing weird and wonderful and weirdly wonderful things, Japan. In particular, famed mangaka and Anime creator Leiji Matsumoto would act as supervisor for the project. Old school anime fans might recognize Matsumoto as the creator of Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express 999. Dudes a legend in the industry and it just so happens that Daft Punk were huge fans of his work, having been inspired by Captain Harlock when the two were younger. So you have a hugely influential dance club act, making a film with one of the most acclaimed Anime creators of all time. How could this not be awesome?

Now when I say this is a visual companion piece to the album, what I mean is that this is the entirety of the Discovery album just with animation on top of it. There’s no spoken dialogue to speak of and sound effects are sparse. The film is essentially one giant music video. They don’t even move around the track listing either, it really is just sitting through the album just with a cartoon attached. Because of that, we might as well start with the music. Discovery is one of my favourite albums of all time. It's arguably the best album Daft Punk ever made; I say arguably because Random Access Memories is a very close contender for that honour. There are some truly fantastic songs here, “One More Time”, “Digital Love”, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”, “Face-To-Face", all great songs.

I will say that if you’re not into experimental techno music, this isn’t the album for you. I get it, musical taste is subjective after all, but I personally like the experimental style of the album. Discovery is Daft Punk playing around with different song structures and musical styles and it gives the album an almost youthful enthusiasm that’s hard not to get into.

The album doesn’t have one definitive sound to it. Every track has a unique feel to it and you never really know what the next song is going to sound like. Even when you do get to a point where you’ve sussed the album out it throws you a curve that completely shatters your expectations. It's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get. It's not a perfect album by any means, the second half does drag on a bit with some slower, more ambient tracks and the closing track “Too Long” is its weakest in my opinion. Ironically enough it’s the weakest because it is, in fact, too long. That had to be intentional, no way that was an accident. Kind of sucks when the closing track is a whimper and not a bang.

Even with its uneven second half, I sincerely enjoy the Discovery album. Even its weaker songs have something enjoyable about them and the good songs are some of the best techno tracks ever recorded. The stand-out for me personally has to be “Digital Love”, a contender for the best Daft Punk song ever recorded. “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” are both very close seconds and I'll always have a spot in my heart for the latter because it’s what introduced me to Daft Punk to begin with, I just like “Digital Love” a tiny bit more.

Editors note: this isn't how the song plays in the film but was the only official video I could find of it. Still love it though.

Now that the music's out of the way I guess the next logical step would be to talk about the animation. You can definitely tell this is a Leiji Matsumoto production. The character designs in particular have his unique style and look like something you would see in Galaxy Express 999, for better or for worse. The female main character looks almost identical to the female main character in Galaxy Express and I noticed they reused a lot of the faces for some of the background characters. Not a huge deal I guess but it is a little distracting once you notice it.

One thing that surprised me about Interstella was that it has quite a number of black characters. That's something you don’t usually see in Anime. Granted most are in the background and the main black character is a blue alien disquised as a black man, wait does that count as black face? I mean he’s clearly designed as a black man before turning black but that’s still kind of fucked up. Accidental racist undertones aside it is interesting to see black character in Japanese animation.

However, like a lot of science fiction, it’s the world design that’s the most interesting thing visually. This is a very cool looking world. I swear to god, one scene of the movie, the “Verdis Quo” sequence to be more specific, has to have been inspired by Castlevania. There's no way in hell that it wasn’t. There's a lot of creativity when it comes to the visuals and there are some truly stunning set pieces. Things can get trippy in places that can make it hard to tell what you’re looking at, but even those sequences are pleasing to look at.

There's a lot of weird looking machinery here. I mean it is a science fiction movie, and an anime one no less, so I expect the technology to look a little out there, but even by those standards this shit is weird. Take the spaceships for example, the villains ship is shaped like a suppository and the hero's spaceship is shaped like a freaking guitar. That is admittedly awesome, but it is also dumb, but it looks cool, but it’s so dumb. I don’t know how to feel about it.

I do like how the film looks overall. It has the style of a classic anime, aka the best kind, but with some modern visual touches. Some of which do date the film quite a bit. The CG doesn’t look great and the visual after-effects in some scenes are too distracting, but these don’t happen often enough to be an issue. My only other gripe would be the colouring. This is a personal beef with me, I can’t stand early 2000’s colouring for Anime. This was around the time when Anime started to use digital colouring more often and it shows. A lot of Anime from this period looks very cheap as a result of this and I've never liked how a lot of them. Interstella does look a lot better than most other Anime during this period but there are times when I’m reminded this came out in the early 2000’s, and not in a good way.

My gripes with the colouring aside, this is still very well animated and it does a good job of matching the music. It felt like the two were in perfect sync and in a film like this that’s very important. On a stylistic level Interstella 5555 is excellent. If I was reviewing this purely based on its audio and visuals it would get a thumbs up. But the film does have a story we still need to analyze. And the story is, how do I put this, complete and utter nonsensical bullshit. Yeah, that about sum it up.

I’m not going to sugar coat it folks, the story in this film is some of the goofiest science fiction nonsense I’ve seen since Avatar. The premise is simple enough. A band from a planet composed of blue people, I guess this is the place from that Eiffel 65 song, are abducted by some asshole named Earl de Darkwood. So the aliens send their greatest space hero Shep to rescue them. Shep? Really? That's the name you went with for your big space hero, you went with Shep.

Alright, dumb names aside, this isn’t a bad set up for a film like this. If you’re going to have a story told without any spoken dialogue, where most of the story telling is told via the visuals, it’s best to keep things simple. The problem with Interstella 5555 is that the story gets ridiculously, insanely convoluted. Remember that Earl de Darkwood guy? You're probably wondering why he bothered to travel millions of light years just to kidnap a bunch of musicians. Well there’s a perfectly rational explanation. He kidnapped them so he could disguise them as an earth band to win a gold record so he can power this machine that will help him take over the universe. Wait what!?

The bad guys plan is one of the most overly complicated villains plots I’ve ever seen. Why did you need to travel into outer space to collect these music acts? Were there no musicians on earth you could use or something. We don’t even know what his machine does that would allow him to conquer the universe, let alone why it needs to be powered by gold records. He doesn’t even just need the one, he needs 5555 of the fucking things. Why such a specific number?

Things get even more ridiculous when it’s revealed he’s been doing this since the renaissance period. Ok first off, he’s immortal apparently. How? Beats me. Second, why haven’t you conquered the world already? You have interstellar travel and advanced technology several thousands years more advanced than what we currently have, just conquer the world by force ya dumpy looking fuck. You have terminators as bodyguards for Arnold's sake, just build an army of them.

We don’t get an explanation of where he even got this technology either. The closest one we get is that a meteorite hit his castle when he was a kid. It's the backstory as Wakanda except there it made at least a little bit of sense, this just leaves me more confused. And if you don’t believe me with how advanced this tech is, just watch this.

The problems don’t just end there either. A lot of things just happen in this movie with no real explanation. And while a lot of it is nice to look at it just leaves you confused as to what in the hell is going on. This is why it’s best to keep things simple in a movie like this, if you can’t explain things to your audience it’s just going to leave them baffled.

There’s also one part of this movie that bugs me. The Gold Records in this movie are portrayed like the Grammy's or any other awards show with nominations and shit. I thought you got a Gold Record by selling a million copies, why is there an elaborate award show for it? You’d think Daft Punk would know this since they’ve won dozens of awards. It's a good thing the album didn’t go platinum because then Darkwood’s plan would be ruined. And how have the Gold Records existed since the renaissance period exactly. This idea didn’t exist until the 1930’s and only makes the fact that Darkwood’s plan goes that far back all the more ridiculous.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the characters picked up the slack. Most of them lack any kind of distinguishing characters traits. The closest we get is with Shep and that’s only because he’s in love with the main female protagonist. Main female protagonist is also basically there to look mournfully out of windows and to act as a damsel in distress. It's disappointing because Anime is usually very good with its female protagonists. You've probably also noticed that I haven’t given any of the band members an actual name. That's because we don’t really get one for them, I think I saw them briefly, but they went by so quickly that they can easily be missed. It's kind of hard to care about the characters when they aren’t even given names. I just called them girl, black guy, short one and other guy.

Because the characters are lacking in, well everything really, it makes it very hard to care for them when the big emotional scenes happen. Theres a moment where a character dies and my only reaction was to just shrug it off. It doesn’t help that it didn’t make much sense as to how they died. They got shot in the shoulder, how did that kill them. Apparently are very bad when it comes to medical matters because they couldn’t fix a single bullet wound. You have interstellar travel, but you don’t know how to get a bullet out of someone’s shoulder. Why are Aliens in movies so fucking stupid?

So you can see the issue here. The technical aspects of the film are great, but the story and characters are lackluster. It's a perfect example of style over substance. Does that make the film bad? Not necessarily. The story might be a convoluted mess and the characters are ultimately forgettable, but the animation and music are so good that it does make for an entertaining ride. It helps that the film is short at just over an hour long, so at least it doesn’t drag.

Can I recommend Interstella 5555? That depends. I can’t call this a good movie, but it is an entertaining one if purely for the visuals and the amazing music. I can only really recommend this movie to fans of both Daft Punk and Anime. If you’re not a fan of either, then this won’t do anything for you. It is an interesting experiment at the very least even if it didn’t fully work out. It's a fun audio and visual experience, but not much else.

Alright, next week we’re looking at The Incredibles. I apologize for this little detour, but I wanted to pay tribute to one of my favourite musical acts. And let’s be honest, when else am I going to be able to talk about this movie. Daft Punk may be hanging up their robot helmets, but we got some great music from them over the years, and we’ll always remember them for that. Au revoir Daft Punk, and thanks for the memories. Until next time.