Daft Punk's Interstella 5555 rocks!

there appear to be no news articles about this in English

"It is during the first meetings of recording of our second Discovery album that we consider the idea of a musical animated drawing, where science fictions and declining show business, limousines and spaceships would mix. We start then, parallel to the music, the writing of the history with our friend and collaborator Cédric Hervet. All three rocked children by Albator and his poetic and enigmatic universe, we dream of a dubious collaboration with Leiji Matsumoto, and fly away with his meeting be 2000 with our album and the synopsis finished under the arm. Arrived to Tokyo, Leiji cordially receives us at his place. Enthusiastic with the listening of the music, it joined our crew at once. We are finally ready to take off in its intergalactic universe baroque. Very quickly, as of its first drafts, the confrontation of our respective worlds seems to function. After a meeting with his/her collaborator Shinji Shimizu, already producing of the Albator series at Toei Animation (mythical company of production; Candy, Goldorak), this last constitutes the team which will be directed by the realizer Kazuhisa Takenoushi. We are in October 2000, and the production of animation can finally start. It will be completed after 28 months of work, many Paris-Tokyo return tickets and innumerable e-mail exchanged with our friend Spike Sugiyama, the only person of the team speaking English and Japanese, ensuring the communication and all the translations necessary to such an artistic collaboration between our two very different cultures.

I'm sure it'll at least come out on DVD, which will be fine with me. I can't believe they actually made the whole thing!

where is 'the other' of which you speak ?!

how long is the fillum by the way.

i think it was a special screening only and i'm not sure it's being shown there again but i'm sure it will be shown in a few more places soon

the film is around 80 minutes long i think, including titles, credits and a few odd pauses between tracks for just sound effects

because of the cosmic jam or the little Daft Punk boy who is carried to bed by his dad?

Overall it's pretty amazing, with some clever jokes too.

I got the thing too, out of the blue (how I got onto that promo list I'm not sure but I'm also not complaining), and sort of half-heartedly watched it while some other things were also happening, so I wasn't paying full attention to it, but a couple of things grabbed me:

1) The album itself makes a whole lot more sense to me now, but it probably shouldn't.
2) I realized for the first time that the whole project was (as Omar notes) a tribute to the 70s, from the Supertramp keyboard licks to the Boston-style sheen (and hey, the guitar-shaped spaceship is totally Boston, no?). Well, apart from the 80s metal guitar wankeroo tribute.
3) The whole thing reminded me of Rock and Rule, though without Iggy and Blondie.
4) The bonus CD with the bonus traxx is a nice bonus.

!

!!

before it came out this was already my favorite movie, but now it's my top three favorite movies.

Fuck, I want those bears.

http://www.lochap.com/music/

and was reminded of how great a movie this was, kid memories of Star Blazers and love for D'arcy, or at least how much their bassist seems like the cartoon incarnation of D'arcy, and of course Daft Punk love, too. oh so great.

you know i never really liked DP, but having just seen this film, i can see what all the fuss was about.
loved it.
and the ending is great !
ps. you know its on google video if you dont have the dvd to hand.

hey this just showed up from netflix.

It's 2009 - there's only one thing you can do - liveblog it

i normally reserve liveblogging for being really drunk, so not sure that will work for me.

get drunk

not committing to much of a liveblog effort here but...so far this is cool but the little drummer smiley generoanime dude is creeping me out.

ok never mind this is the shit, and wow surrrounnnddd sound is unbelievable.

Would be cool if you would try to describe the plotline, because I own it and watch it occasionally and still have no idea what is happening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstella_5555

Holy Crap, Daft Punk is Scoring Disney's Tron 2.0!

!!!!!

Perfect.

stunning job on the remaster for the theatrical re-release. AI is incredible.

https://i.ibb.co/KLg8VQX/dafty.jpg

yeah, i ended up not minding having to miss it

the audio was worse

videos afterward were great though. had never heard of or seen Infinity Repeating.

I still had fun. it was packed. they played it alright-loud at my screening, but I would have turned it up

went yesterday and enjoyed it. realised it had been years, not just since I watched the film but since I actually listened to the album all the way through.

Didn't know about the controversy surrounding the AI stuff while I was watching, but I assume this was largely just tools to help touch up the animation quality.

That said, I was struck by how much of the artwork looked like half-rendered Dall-E images from a couple of years ago, especially when things were represented from far away. I'm sure this was always the way it looked, but it really did have that quality to it, so now I'm wondering if it was AI at work there

There was, they did an AI upscale for sure.

sure, but i'd assume that would just be a machine to bring things up to 4K levels, not to actually render the art itself. my memory of the original is too dim to recall what it looked like before

sure, but i'd assume that would just be a machine to bring things up to 4K levels

lol, rofl

I was struck by how much of the artwork looked like half-rendered Dall-E images from a couple of years ago, especially when things were represented from far away.

this is what ai upscaling can do - creating detail that wasn't actually there and making things look weird and blurry. there are ways to use it effectively but a lot of 'ai upscaling' isn't well applied with poor results unfortunately, because it's relatively low effort.

apparently the original film was very poorly preserved so they were working with a very poor quality copy and they felt it was the best they could do without spending an absurd amount or something

fair dos. i mean, if that's the case though it did look pretty discomfiting. until i got home, i didn't know about the ai stuff and just thought somehow the artworkers had drawn these things remarkably similar to how AI used to generate images about 2 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/1h9s0vd/comparison_of_image_detail_from_the_interstella/

https://preview.redd.it/comparison-of-image-detail-from-the-interstella-5555-bluray-v0-n059t70vpo5e1.png?width=1040&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba18db178441ca10b6ada58859e296018db24f80

yeah... hmmm yeah you can really tell. it's got that strange wispy/vagueness to it. looks dated already. a real shame, that

there are surely alternatives to getting the whole thing manually redrawn frame by frame and *this* - curious as to what state the prints were in, if it was released theatrically before then there will surely be multiple prints out there?

apparently the original film was very poorly preserved so they were working with a very poor quality copy and they felt it was the best they could do without spending an absurd amount or something

or they could have left it the fuck alone. seeing as how my brain can fill in the details on those fuzzy images 100000000% more accurately than ai.

according to r/daftpunk they never struck any prints, and the 'master' is a bad PAL transfer from the 90s xp

https://www.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/1gh7gr4/interstella_5555_remaster_faqdiscussion_thread/

well if they transferred it five years before it was drawn then no wonder it was badly done

also pretty impressive that the theatrical screenings at the time were all done by someone standing in front of the projection booth making shadow puppets with their hands

and that this print that shows occasionally in Perth, most recently two months ago, is generated anew each time by concentrated telepathy and evaporates reel-by-reel after each cigarette burn flashes on screen

a good overall experience—namely, hearing Discovery in surround sound

uhhhhhh.

sorry, a lot of that was editorializing on my part - i had forgotten it was originally released right after 9/11. the reddit link has more info

i do remember that it wasn't hand puppets though but rather silhouettes cut out of fine-grained french leather. unfortunately it's a dying craft and the remaining practitioners are mostly retired - i'm thinking that they probably couldn't wrangle together enough puppeteers for this re-release.

(it was released in 2003 btw for passing readers)

Considering how loud movies have become lately my showing at an Alamo theater featured sound straight from the late 70s strip mall three-plex of my youth