Anvil and Sprocket Movie Review

Q: Are we not men? A: We are… Daft Punk?

On a bizarre, alien planet, a quartet of blue-skinned rockers are getting everybody to get up off their butts and jam. In fact, their entire world is so entranced by their music that they don’t notice an oncoming alien invasion until it’s far too late. In minutes, the live audience is gassed and the band abducted. With a spacebound hero hot on their heels, the aliens take their captives to their home world – Earth – where they change the colors of their skins, fabricate Earthling memories, place them under the influence of mind control devices, and set them loose as a hit pop act called “The Crescendolls.”

It’s an odd enough story, but it’s not unexpected. What else would you expect from a collaboration between Daft Punk and Leiji Matsumoto? After all, Daft Punk is the French house duo who appear in public as faceless androids, claiming to have been transformed from men to machines after a tragic mixing board explosion, and Matsumoto is the man who put a pirate ship on the solar winds in Captain Harlock and a steam engine on invisible rails through space in Galaxy Express 999. The collision of two such oddball artistic aesthetics could only be considered strange if it produced something completely normal.

“Four kids who don’t play their own instruments? Genius!”

It’s important when going into a movie like Interstella 5555 that you have a good idea of what you are in for, so let’s start with the big thing that everybody notices first. There is no dialogue in this movie. The poster proclaims it to be “The Animated House Musical,” but don’t expect the mix of music and dialogue that you’ll find in a traditional musical. IThe term that occurred to me as I watched was “ballet,” as the characters don’t even directly interact with or produce the music except for the first and last numbers. In fact, throughout the movie it appears that The Crescendolls have only one song, “One More Time,” which serves as the opening number.

The idea of setting a movie to a complete album typically leads people down the Beyond the Mind’s Eye or Animusic route, but refreshingly Matsumoto decides to go with traditional cel animation that features an overarching story as opposed to vignettes of “look what I can do with computers” animation. Characterization is light and drawn in broad strokes. People familiar with Matsumoto’s previous work will recognize his stock designs quickly – dashing hero, dastardly villain, and dumpy comic relief to name just a few . The story is rife with criticism of pop exploitation, as the unscrupulous record executive literally cranks The Crescendolls out of a machine after selecting the most marketable looks for them. In fact, as the movie reveals, the Crescendolls are only the latest in a long string of one-hit wonders generated via this method.

Wow. They start ravers young on this planet.

It occurred to me about halfway through the movie that I was seeing a very deftly-executed thought experiment. Matsumoto had taken Daft Punk’s album and used it to finally bring to life the images that danced in his mind, as he speaks about in a brief live action segment at the beginning. It also occurred to me that I was the wrong audience for just such a project. This led me to wonder what, exactly the right audience would be.

I actually like electronica, but I’ve found that even the best electronica gets on my nerves after a while. While I can enjoy the music, it’s not something that I want to sit down and listen to an entire album of. The same argument actually applies to electronica’s core audience – the folks who go to clubs and raves are very rarely interested in sitting through the entire show. That’s why the music specifically populates clubs and raves. One viewer who posted his thoughts on Netflix encouraged others to watch the movie with lots of friends, the lights turned down, the volume turned up, and glowsticks. That certainly puts the movie with its core demographic, but if you’re considering turning your living room into a makeshift dancehall, one would question why you need Leiji Matsumoto’s imaginative visuals.