The Null Device

MIFF: Interstella 5555

I just came back from seeing Interstella 5555, and it rocked. It's a collaboration between more-interesting-than-most French vocoder-house outfit Daft Punk and an anime studio, and is essentially an animated feature whose soundtrack is the entire last Daft Punk album, with a few minor edits. The story involves an ancient villain turned pop-music svengali abducting the Biggest Rock Band In The Galaxy from a concert on the Planet of the Smurfs and pressing them into work as a manufactured pop sensation on Earth. The imagery references a lot of classic anime (for example, the spaceship control room and spacesuit designs borrow from 1970s anime series Battle of the Planets, and that's not to mention the shape-shifting spaceship); most of the characters are drawn fairly naturalistically, except for the band's drummer who is a goofy, smurf-like munchkin. Anyway, hopefully this will end up on DVD; it certainly made me see Daft Punk in a new light.

(The feature which came before it was Kaidohmaru, another anime set in feudal Japan. It didn't really grab me; also, the video seemed very washed out. I'm not sure whether this was a technical problem or some anime idiom alien to me.)

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