Interstella 5555 Unites Anime and Daft Punk Fans in Anti-Corporate Music Message

The winter of 2021 and my senior year of college, I had never been so forcibly alone. We couldn’t leave our five-person pods and class involved sanitizing your desk and sitting yards away from your peers in a mask. I barely spoke to another person, and being on Earth didn’t feel particularly great.

The only photos I have of that winter are an odd collection of mirror selfies taken in my senior housing unit bathroom, pictures of the frigid Minnesota prairie taken quickly before shoving my mitten back on, and more mirror selfies taken in the new science building. 

It was a vast, angular, monstrosity, and I felt safe in its echoing, sterile halls and floating stairs. I got into the habit of working there late into the night after the building had closed from the outside. I would go in the bathroom while the security guards did a walk-through kicking people out. When they left, I would return to my seat, the only person in that cavernous spaceship.

After a few more hours, I would trudge across a barren campus swimming in grimy yellow light coming from low-hanging clouds and light pollution. And that whole time, I was listening to Daft Punk’s Discovery and hearing outer space inside my head. It was synthetically melancholy and euphoric in equal doses, and it comforted me. 

Promo image for Interstella 5555 / via Paris Secret

So obviously, when I saw that Daft Punk was re-releasing their 2003 animated film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem and that it would be playing at Seattle’s SIFF Uptown theater, I got a ticket.

The animated film sets the 2001 album Discovery to a story about an extraterrestrial band who’s kidnapped and brought to Earth by a power-hungry music executive who makes them massively popular and exploits their talent. In an interview with Billboard, Daft Punk’s former manager, Pedro Winter, explained that the band wrote Discovery with the vision of a film in mind, using the music as a “skeleton,” and then got in touch with Leiji Matsumoto to oversee its production; Matsumoto had created the anime series Space Pirate Captain Harlock, which they had watched as children.

The original film was digitally animated, but there were some issues with frame rate and resolution. The original masters were also not available to use in a remastered version, and so with the re-release, Daft Punk resorted to using AI upscaling to fix the original film’s resolution issues, which drew some heavy criticism from fans of the original project. The film was re-released in over 1500 theaters globally on December 12, 2024, SIFF Uptown included. 

I was shocked that nearly all 500 seats of SIFF’s Theater One were filled. Music and anime nerds united in our mutual admiration for this psychedelic, vibrantly colored sci-fi dreamscape. A castle lit up in the snow during the opening chords of the funereal “Veridis Quo.” The nostalgic digital arpeggio of “Superheroes” playing when Shep, an astronaut set on rescuing the band from Earth, shoots them with recognition so they break out of their mind control and remember what happened to them. These moments would stay with me long after the screen went dark and I walked out into the rainy Seattle evening. 

Daft Punk’s Alive tour poster for Seattle, 2007

Designed by Mazui Foundation Vtg

SIFF puts effort into creating programming that reflects Seattle’s music-loving spirit. The upcoming winter lineup includes showings of the 2020 punk rock dark comedy Dinner in America and the cult classic 2004 documentary Dig! which follows the trials and tribulations of two psych-rock bands The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. 

The mysterious helmeted French duo that is Daft Punk have toured in Seattle multiple times in their career, most recently in 2007 on their Alive Tour when they performed at the WAMU Theater. Though the band officially broke up in 2021 (during my bleak winter of Discovery), this most recent revival in interest in their work is evidence that the band’s impact remains strong, and Interstella 5555’s critique of corporate corruption remains as relevant as ever.