#169: Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003)

 

Directors: Kazuhisa Takenouchi (with Daisuke Nishio, Hirotoshi Rissen and Leiji Matsumoto)

Original Premise by Thomas Bangalter, Cédric Hervet and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo

Music by: Daft Punk

 

In the early 2000s, we had quite a few moments where anime crossed into the mainstream. Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards. Quentin Tarantino one day knocked on Production I.G.'s doorstep, and thus they contributed an animated sequence to Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)¹. The Animatrix (2003) was also commissioned, where Japanese animators (alongside figures like Peter Chung) worked on short films based on the world of The Matrix, with the added weight that the Wachowskis were anime fans, which influenced with their work but also meant that, directly working on the project, they would have allowed the creators they were inspired by to flex their crafting muscles. Another, sadly becoming obscurer, is when the French electronic music duo Daft Punk, in the midst of one of their most well regarded albums Discovery, was coming up with a narrative and ended up collaborating with a childhood hero Leiji Matsumoto.

France has had a healthy relationship with Japanese anime and manga, as Daft Punk themselves Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo) came into this project having grown up as children on the likes of Captain Harlock², which, whether the 1978 or 1982 animated television adaptation of Matsumoto's original manga, was a character exported to France and given the name Albator. Just the fact that Matsumoto, in 2012, was knighted in France made a Knight of the order of Arts and Letters by the French government, a title gained by the likes of Bob Dylan to fellow manga author/anime director Katsuhiro Otomo among many, says a lot of how his work came to the country and left an impression³. 

Matsumoto's history and reputation just in his own country, in manga but also direct interaction with anime productions, is a huge one not only for characters he created like Harlock, but also for shows like the famous Space Battleship Yamato (1974-5), a cultural monolith to say the least in Japanese culture he was an original creator and director on. Note that Leiji Matsumoto is not the director on this project - those would be Kazuhisa Takenouchi as the main director, with Daisuke Nishio and Hirotoshi Rissen as unit directors, and Matsumoto himself the visual supervisor. His trademarks are still visible in Interstella 5555 even just in terms of the character designs, one of his biggest trademarks.

Coming up with the premise early into the album's origins, the pair does co-exist as they embrace an openly over-the-top plot which is entirely told visually without any dialogue. That on their alien home world, a band is kidnapped and shipped to Earth by the evil Earl de Darkwood, transforming and even brainwashing them to blend with the human populous as the band the Crescendolls. His plan is openly ridiculous - a centuries old prophecy powered by 5555 golden records won at award shows for smash hit singles - but in a world where another alien, Shep, commands his guitar shaped spaceship to rescue the band, this is the house music equivalent to a rock music, suspending conventional reality as it has to also work entirely on visuals provided by Toei Animation, which they pull off.

The music is, well, entirely dependent on your love of Daft Punk or lack of it. Discovery was a huge album at the time it dropped in 2001, and also worth mentioning is that even before Interstella 5555, the enigmatic duo who dressed as robots were already smart with providing the right visuals to their music from working with Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze among others. All their albums have distinct personalities as well, and whilst it was a long time from having listened to the Discovery, just starting this film, that is the length or so of the album and has all the tracks, reminded me of how much I did listen to Discovery. How even the melancholic instrumental piece Nightvision stayed in memory, and that, still to this day, Face to Face is an underappreciated song from the album. Especially for Digital Love, where Shep (in love with the female bassist Stella) has a fantasy of them flying through a psychedelic dream sequence, you have a perfect matching of visuals to audio full of life, the projects intertwining to the point that the singles for the album had sequences from the film as their music videos.

It helps Matsumoto's character designs are uniquely his. Not of any era but very distinctly his, his female characters especially (based on actresses like Marianne Hold, Eleanor Parker, Danielle Darrieux, and Kaoru Yachigusa⁴) like thin ethereal figure than human beings, a style which is helped by the amount of adaptations of his work that exist in anime. Even if the likes of Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 (2012-2013) updated the designs, he lent himself a timeless aesthetic to his work even if Interstella 5555 was also meant as a nostalgia piece. He was happy to weave in themes meaningful to him alongside this openly exaggerated premise, of self sacrifice and heroics alongside a film involving such pulpy details like cyborg bodyguard and a Gothic castle full of hooded cultists who push musicians into a volcanic hole. Even in spite of the violence that does transpire through the film, and one very tragic death, it ends on a reconciliation of Earth with the aliens by helping them back home, including the amusement of a world having to explain in the news that aliens do exist in the first place. And the final images, of a boy in a bedroom dreaming all this film, do really gain a power knowing that the musicians who created Daft Punk were able to make a work like this with their childhood hero. It also makes sense that, a decade on, they purposely stepped away from the electronic music they helped solidify by making Random Access Memories, an album stripping back as much artifice as possible and working back to seventies ideals of music without being delusional rose tinted glasses. The likes of Giorgio Moroder and even Paul Williams appearing on that album in itself was them managing to find more childhood heroes and giving them a platform to stand out too.

Contextually, and even now, this film looks gorgeous and was an achievement, a bright and elaborate work whose ability to tell this tale entirely without words, and only breaking from the musical tracks with some ambient noises, shows how much you can pull off in animation just in said visuals. Out of its directors, naturally many of them, working for Toei Animation, worked on Dragonball properties among the many properties the company hold. It is hilarious as one final note, but with a charming weight, that main director Kazuhisa Takenouchi early in his career helmed Vampire Wars (1990), a lurid OVA title that is not fondly remember. I did not know this until writing this review, very familiar with both of them, making this as charming as it is amusing that one man can go from such a title, an old Manga Entertainment license which ended up with vampires from outer space as a plot twist, to something like this a decade later which he can take completely pride in, in collaborating on this impressive production, and has a more positive image of visitors from outer space as two planets in the final scenes get to rock out across space and time.

 

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1) According to Production I.G.'s own website on the subject (as can be read HERE): "Reportedly a fan of Ghost in the Shell and Blood: The Last Vampire, movie maker Quentin Tarantino personally asked Production I.G to produce the animation sequence included in his world-hit Kill Bill..."

2) As documented in a review HERE.

3) As referred to HERE.

4) As revealed in an interview HERE.