For a band as much visual in their all-encompassing masks as they are submerged in the atomic sound of an electronic symphony that transformed a genre, it should be no surprise that Daft Punk's ambitions spread far beyond the world of music. It was during recording for their iconic Discovery album that the idea for creating some sort of film to go with the album was first brought up, eventually leading themselves to the doorstep of their childhood hero and the creation of Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem.
Growing up in France, Daft Punk were big fans of Leiji Matsumoto's work on Space Pirate Captain Harlock, which broadcast in the country and was just as big a hit across the globe as it was in his home country. After discarding the idea of creating some sort of The Wall-esque live action film to accompany the album, the idea to approach Matsumoto and turn their transcendent work into a musical symphony across the cosmos was the eventual decision, a chance to work with a hero and fulfill the goal they brought up during the initial recording sessions.
After a few years of work, first getting in contact with Toei Animation and bringing Matsumoto on board as a visual supervisor, entrusting Shinji Shimizu to produce the animation and Kazuhisa Takenouchi to be its director while having him play a role in shaping the overall look and feel. The result, while not exactly a hit that recouped its box office finances, has endured with love for the album to remain relevant decades later.
It’s easy to see why. While one could dismiss it as a 65-minute music video, Interstella 5555 speaks a lot to the idea of Discovery as a defining album in the duo’s discography of finding a musical voice. Conceptually about alien artists ripped from their planet and stripped of their memories till they once again ‘discover’ who they are and work to find themselves and revitalize their sound and liberate themselves; it’s a movie designed to parallel the creators behind it that soars as a result.
Yet distinctly, it also endures as an independent work as much as a compliment to this album as it feels like a true collaboration, not any sort of outsourced project or singular vision. Matsumoto’s career is one shaped and defined in the world of sci-fi, steeped in philosophical themes and topics of morality that use the vastness of space as a foil for these complex conversations on morality. As a manga artist he created the world of Space Battleship Yamato then brought it to life in animation as its lead director. Its melancholy means this world has continued to be reinterpreted by new generations, and even now after his death, the series has made a return to cinemas for a new generation.
There’s a mystery that endures both in his most renowned work with Harlock and Yamato, and that find their way into Interstella 5555. They’re torn from the same cloth, while the music and vision remains undoubtedly driven by director Takenouchi and Daft Punk working in harmony. It also helps that its early-2000s release as an international collaboration coincided with the growing interest in anime outside Japan, a boom that in recent years has only helped draw more eyeballs to this unique project and the broader works of its Japanese collaborators.
So it’s a shame to see the vision tarnished like it is with the planned cinematic rerelease.
Earlier this year, during a celebration for Daft Punk and the album held on Twitch, a new 4K remaster was streamed for free. The issue is, rather than going back and rescanning the original negatives to bring the grain, colors and linework to their highest quality, an AI upscale was used. Even in the choppy bitrate of live streaming, the problems were clear. The delicate artwork of the film was replaced by a smeared, dull, Vaseline-like gloss that only dampened the image and impeded the fluidity of the animation that made it such an intriguing project in the first place.
How do you honor a legacy? The aforementioned ongoing Yamato re-releases are using the high-quality remasters produced from the original materials to curate a selection of episodes that, across three programs landing in cinemas throughout December and January, aim not just to capture the story of the series but its intent and meaning, as well as what endures and continues to resonate with audiences. At a Tokyo International Film Festival that included the latest and greatest upcoming live-action releases and a slate of animated films both old and new, the film version was showcased in a 4K remaster with voice actor Asagami Yoko there to talk to a packed screen. When I went past an outdoor screen situated outside Hibiya Chanter for the festival as it played classic Yamato films, the enduring love for this work was apparent in how every seat and almost all the standing room was taken by people determined to catch the film, even as the temperature dropped and the sun dipped from the sky.
It’s the animation, these worlds, that continue to be loved and find new meaning. There’s an enduring appeal to cel animation prior to the advent of modern digital technology for its imperfections and use of color and light that gives a timeless quality to old anime that continues to draw fans to these works. And in the case of Interstella 5555, this is a film with heavy involvement by the creator of these same works, with as much enduring love both for its animation and music in equal reverence.
At a time when we question if Generative AI can replace writers, replace artists, if it can supersede humans as it feeds off our artistic heritage, we see the consequences of falling for this line of thinking. Based on trailers, the same AI remaster of Interstella 5555 shown online a few months earlier will be what hits cinema screens worldwide this week, smearing and tarnishing a classic work with a supposedly ‘definitive’ reproduction that takes the human craft and replaces it with a glob of color. It resembles an artistic past, the one inspired by a childhood, crafted piece by piece from the lessons of decades of work, from a journey of self-discovery. But the legacy of these lessons is lost when you deem artistic craft worthy of such a shoddy work of supposed self-preservation that instead feels more of a self-sabotage and lack of confidence in the value of the time and investment needed to give this work the clean facelift it deserves.
Maybe next time will be a ‘discovery’ of how we can rebuild a wonky spaceship home from the corpses of stolen art. Has less of a resonance, though, doesn’t it?
I decide instead to remember what the work represented on its release, rather than how this new release dampens that. As one of the earliest examples of international collaboration promoted as such and created with the intent to merge these artistic styles together (rather than a simple outsourcing job as some classic American cartoons were), and as a musical film, it has a worthy place in history. It deserves to be remembered, rediscovered, even. Just not like this.
