Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003) dir. Kazuhisa Takenouchi
On a distant planet inhabited by blue humanoids, the popular band Crescendolls, their name on earth, is playing a succesful concert when the planet is invaded by a force from earth, who kidnaps the band and brings them to earth. Shep, a starship captain who's in love with Stella, the bass player, manages to follow the kidnappers through the wormhole to earth. On earth the band is taken to secret facility where their memories are downloaded onto a disc, and they are fitted with mind control devices as well as made to look like humans. Their captor the Earl of Darkwood posses as their manager, and the band quickly takes the world by storm and becomes a world sensation. Until Shep flies into a stadium concert with a jet pack and removes the mind control devices from the band. Together they escape but Shep is mortally wounded in the process. Now the band has to try and reclaim their memories and return to their home planet.
Taking an album and turning it into a film is not something this movie invented. But Discovery is hardly a story when you listen to it, unless you have a really good imagination. So you probably needed to have made the album to think there was one, and apparently there was, or atleast a story that fit the music. The story is hardly groundbreaking, but it's thematically strong, and Daft Punk are writing about stuff they know about. The music industry, fame, and celebrity culture. Neither of which I think they are particularly fond of, and that shows in how they portray it in the film. Each song on the album represents one scene in the film, and that creates some rough transitions along the way when two songs are quite different in tempo and emotion, which the movie has to match immediately as well. And there are points in the movie where an interlude of sorts would have been nice to bridge the gap between songs and give the film a better flow. But I guess that was the premise of the film.
A lot of the music in the film has a lot of disco and funk vibes, and is very 80s inspired, and the band claims it's based on the music of their childhoods. Similarly the film is stylistically very much like an anime show, and thus carries that theme of it all being a sort homage to their childhoods. I think the film looks really good. There's lots of very cool "sets", if you can call them that in an animated movie, which really helps bring this sci-fi world to life. Since there's no dialogue, bar a couple of songs which are presented as being from the perspective of a particular character, almost all the communication in the film is non-verbal, and that puts extra pressure on the animation, since it needs to convey emotions very succinctly without overdoing it. And they do that very well, it of course puts a limit on emotional complexity, but I don't think it's something that you really notice while watching it. No dialogue also puts extra pressure on the visual storytelling, and while the story is fairly simple, it's made very easy to follow.
I really like Daft Punk, so I quite like this film, and I'm vibing with the music the whole as well. But I don't really know how it is to watch if you are not into Daft Punk. It would be hard to call it a bad film, it's technically well made, it's a good story and it's told well. But it might be hard to get into what is basically an hour long music video if you don't care much for the music. I also really like that it's someone getting a bit of a crazy idea and then making it happen, it's always more fun when things happen that way, even if they don't always work out.