INTERSTELLA 5555: THE 5TORY
OF THE 5ECRET 5TAR 5YSTEM

Year: 2003
UK: Soda Pictures
Music: Daft Punk featuring Romanthony, Todd Edwards, DJ Sneak
Director: Kazuhisa Takenouchi
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
UK: 68 mins
UK Certificate: PG contains mild fantasy violence
UK Release Date: 24 October 2003
UK DVD Release Date: 1 December 2003

Synopsis

Four musicians from another galaxy are kidnapped by an evil manager to ultimately become the biggest band on earth. Daft Punk's music meets Leiji Matsumoto's designs for this animated musical....

Background

Daft Punk is the electronic group that has taken techno out of the clubs and given it to the masses across the planet. After their HOMEWORK album achieved sales of over 2 million, and having been acclaimed as much by fellow musicians as by the record-buying public, the duo comprising Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo have proved that there are no rules when it comes to success in the music industry.

Avoiding a predictable path of media saturation, Daft Punk settled on a different method of attack: remaining anonymous or becoming androids, and writing songs that captured the spirit of the moment and blasting their way through the traditional boundaries separating house, disco and funk.

Simultaneously, they have made a series of radical and groundbreaking videos, directed by a raft of leading young directors (Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Roman Coppola, Seb Janiak) or by themselves (FRESH, starring Spike Jonze among others), and mounted extravagantly staged live shows that held nothing back in terms of spectacle.

In 1999, before the format had swept all before it, Daft Punk released a DVD that was the first music release to fully explore the possibilities of interactivity. They then disappeared to spend two years preparing their new album, DISCOVERY. The album saw Daft Punk scaling new heights, crafting a release that steadfastly refused to follow any predetermined formula.

Embracing an open-mindedness verging on the iconoclastic, the duo have drawn on other melodies, other sounds, other voices (including those of Romanthony and Todd Edwards) to create a work of mind-altering richness.

Testament to their constant need to push back the boundaries, Daft Punk approached Leiji Matsumoto, one of the living gods of Japanese animation, to collaborate on their next audiovisual adventure INTERSTELLA 5555: THE 5TORY OF THE 5ECRET 5TAR 5YSTEM an animated musical film like you've never seen before.