To explain the impact that Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem has had on the lucky generations who have had the privilege of witnessing its thunderous, albeit broken, explosion in the rotations of MTV, we would have to make an important mental leap, that is, forgetting more than 20 years of the internet. Watching it today for the first time – for the record it will be back in theaters from 12 to 15 December in a remastered version in 4K – Interstella 5555 remains a splendid film that cements the artistic collaboration between Daft Punk, one of the most important bands of the last 30 years , and Leiji Matsumoto, one of the cartoonists who made the history of manga and anime, as well as a great album (the soundtrack is Discoverythe brightest diamond in Daft's discography) meets a beautifully drawn and narrated anime (the criticism of the music industry that drives the film's plot is more contemporary than ever). However, it is impossible to rediscover today that bewitching power that conquered radio, TV and the public.
Interstella 55555 was released at the tail end of a period in which sung electronic music was very popular in Europe – in the year of Daft Punk's One More Time, 2000, in the Italian charts we find songs like Lady of the Modjo, Freestylers of Bomfunk Mc's, Groovejet by Spiller with Sophie-Ellis Bextor – and attention towards the world of anime was beginning to be widespread thanks to the seriality of works such as Dragon Ball, One Piece and the explosion of the Ghibli universe (Miyazaki's masterpiece, The enchanted citywill be released in 2001). In this, Daft Punk were phenomenal at capturing the zeitgeist of those days, but adding a pinch of genius in the form of a decisive and fundamental twist.
Daft Punk's game has always been to pass off the past as the future. If the onset Homework did not have this ambition, and in fact it remains a different gem in the duo's discography and videography (as well as the only sound episode before the transformation into robot), from Discovery This deceit it is the key to understanding their sound and visual universe. But, here too, we need to take a step back to those years when the internet was still immature and information was difficult to find. In this uncultivated land of the beginning of the Internet, like the new KLF, Daft Punk were very clever in playing with urban legends and mythology, fomenting an aura of mystery around their work. It will be with the success of YouTube (founded only at the end of 2005), in fact, that many of the Daft Punk generation will discover through various tutorials the quantity of '70s samples regurgitated, chopped up, repositioned in the grids of the songs Discovery; a sort of collective awakening from kayfabe programmed by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, the two brilliant strategists disguised as robots. Ultimately their future was nothing more than an intelligent, catchy and updated revival of the past.
All this also applies to Interstella 5555which arrived in cinemas in 2003 after having been savored, at times, in the videos accompanying the singles taken from Discovery (which instead is dated 2001). Since the choice to involve Leiji Matsumoto, a cartoonist who became famous for some masterpieces of the 70s such as Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999 And Queen EmeraldsDaft Punk do not aim for the future, but for a contemporary revisitation of a past that they themselves idealized. And so too Interstella, which we Gen Daft Punk absorbed as an artifact of the future that came to shatter the rules of the industry (and of MTV), is nothing more than a reversal of the timeline applied by the two Frenchmen. Smart, Daft Punk have always been, but this ability to mix temporal levels has always played on their side: not only have Daft Punk always been considered (or mistaken) for an artistic product of the future, but all their production (recording and visual) has thus become a instant classic. Just like Discovery, an album that doesn't seem to have aged a day, the remastered Interstella film hasn't stood the test of time. And this is definitely Daft Punk's greatest quality.
Photo: courtesy of Nexo Studios
Interstella 5555 it is however, in itself, a great idea transformed into a fantastic (in both senses of the term) production. That the project was bigger than the work itself was already clear with the choice to work with a visionary cartoonist like Matsumoto, capable of building a shared narrative universe in his main works. It is therefore no coincidence that Interstellar 5555 fits, in its own way, into a multiverse (well before the pop use of the concept of multiverse), in which it explicitly recalls the protagonists of Matsumoto's manga: Stella, the bassist of the Crescendolls, the band protagonist of the film, recalls the twins Maetal and Emersaldas, while Baryl, the drummer, is designed to look like Tetsuro Hoshino, the protagonist of Galaxy Express 999 ,while Shep, the astronaut called to save the band, can resemble Captain Harlock after a clean haircut. As with the temporal and auditory issue (the use of samples), the visual apparatus also lives on recalls, reconstructions. We have already seen everything, we already know everything, and yet this all seems damn new to us.
Seen today from this perspective, comfortably seated in the cinema, Interstella 5555 becomes the ideal key to understanding all the secrets implemented by the French robots and then definitively explained in the farewell of Random Access Memorywhere the concept of memory and reactualization of a past were so transparent as to close a circle that began there, at the passing of the millennium, precisely with Discovery And Interstella. Daft Punk from after RAM they no longer needed to exist, they had already become immortal like the Crescendolls of Interstella 5555.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
