An hour long music video experience
After the discovery of "Interstella 5555: The Story of the Secret Star System", I am convinced of one thing: if you haven't watched it yet, you're one daft punk. In terms of the underlying and clearly not punny meaning, this is a one hour long music video. In terms of the superficial meaning though, you're ACTUALLY daft and missing out if you haven't watched this movie.
While it may be an animated movie following the style of oldies like Code Geass, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Clannad, etc. don't let that deter you from watching it just because it's "anime". The artwork is great, the animation nicely fluid and the way the visuals tie in together with the music is wonderfully done. If that doesn't really appeal to you, then hopefully the rest of the stuff I'm going to outline is more attractive.
For your sake, I won't be mentioning a single thing that might reveal anything at all for the plot-line for this 2003 movie; I think one of the things that accentuated this movie's awesomeness is the fact that I didn't know a single thing before diving into it. To be honest though, even if you did know the plot-line summary, it wouldn't matter much because you never actually expect so much effort to be put in something like this to help convey a story to an audience. What must have made this incredible venture even more of a struggle is that there isn't a single dialogue. The entire movie is basically playing the album from start to finish, each song nearly perfectly setting the tone for the scene that it's assigned to. Even THAT is made extra difficult (in my opinion, anyway) by the fact that most of the songs in the tracklist are instrumentals, with a few iconic lyrical songs like "One More Time", "Digital Love", "Something About Us", etc.
Despite this setting for a painful limitation in the ability to convey everything to the viewers, the story never fails express what it wants to, remaining immersive from start to finish. In fact, Daft Punk takes these limitations and instead uses it to accentuate the strengths of the movie. There is little in the story that is spoon-fed to you like a film usually tends to do. The lack of dialogue, backstory, several unanswered questions and slightly open-ended interpretation of many scenes is what makes this such a beautiful movie, because now you have half the abstract puzzle pieces. Instead of getting a full instruction on how to set the puzzle up, you've got someone telling you "Yeah, sure man go ahead and do whatever you want" so you have to make the other half of the puzzle pieces yourself, basing your perception of the story on what the movie has told you so far about itself.
That's not the end of it either because what's even cooler is the fact that the integrity of the entire story progression and plot-line remains solid, even though the entire time, all that's happening in the movie in terms of audio is just that: the audio. Perhaps there is the possibility that you may think that this seems rather easy to do but see, the story is sci-fi and fantasy, and it's already hard as it is to present a world properly in both those two genres in just normal circumstances like a book, or TV series, or anime, etc. However, what does Daft Punk do? Make a great music video along a vein of a merger of those two genres that not only expresses the world building awesomely in just one hour, but even hold the cast's characteristic depth, even though they don't speak a single word the entire time, not even as a voice reveal or something. This leaves the characteristic traits to be decided by how they react to certain stimuli, their roles in the story, and weirdly enough, their facial expressions.
What's even nuttier is how the movie still manages to make you feel things as you watch it. All the incredible songs in the album only succeed in outlining the emotions even more strongly.
This movie is a rare gem for both cinemaphiles and regular people. Don't miss out on it.
Rasheed Khan is a hug monster making good music but terrible puns and jokes where he's probably the only one laughing. Ask him how to pronounce his name at [email protected]
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