Interstella 5555: “the 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem” (part one)
This fast lane review was commissioned by @CV12Hornet
Unlike most of the works I've reviewed until now, this isn't going to be a blind watch. I saw Interstella 5555 for the first time just a few years ago, and while I don't remember all the details most of it is still pretty clear in my memory. As usual for such cases, I'll try to compartmentalize my prior knowledge and clearly telegraph it when I make an exception.
It's also going to be different from any of my previous reviews because of the medium. Interstella 5555 is an hour-long animated music video for the 2001 Daft Punk album "Discovery." The movie was released two years later, courtesy of anime studio Toei Animation working with the France based BAC Films.
When I say music video, I don't mean a musical, or even something along the lines of a rock opera where the characters sing the dialogue at each other. I mean an actual music video. There's no dialogue, and only minimal sound effects besides those fourteen techno-dance tracks. That said, it isn't the type of cartoon music video that just amounts to psychedelic abstract art shifting to the beat of the music. It has a clear narrative, and tells a complete, self-contained story. The TYPE of story it tells...well, that kind of gets to the point of why I'm giving it this whole introduction.
I've already expressed some regrets about my original RWBY liveblog. Both because of the hyperbolic presentation, and because I frankly just wasn't a very experienced writer or critic yet, and my pop culture exposure had some major blind spots in the show's adjacent genres. However, that doesn't come close to how much I regret my handling of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Was I wrong about the meandering plots that go nowhere, the botched or forgotten-midway-though character arcs, the ever-mounting juvenility, or the way the drama and tension undermine themselves via constant asspulls? No. But, the joke was still on me, because I couldn't get it through my head that sometimes the story isn't the point. No one watches JJBA for deep and compelling characters, or high-stakes excitement, or exploration of interesting themes and questions. For the most part, they don't even watch it because of how it fails at those things (there is an element of so-bad-it's-good to JJBA's appeal, but that isn't what bought it cult status). People watch JJBA because its unpredictable, hyperenergetic, and fun to talk about. The qualities that gave JoJo its popularity aren't the opposite of my tastes; they're orthogonal to everything I normally look for in a piece of fiction.
The "DrunkJo" reviews when I sat down with my wife and friends and did live commentary over booze were easily the most fun I had watching JJBA. What I didn't realize until long after the fact is that those were also the only times that I was engaging with the work correctly.
...
Ironically, I do think that - at least for the first few arcs - the author of JJBA was trying to tell a story that can be engaged with conventional literary analysis and critique. His successes and failures on that front just aren't all that important to what he actually produced or how an audience should approach it.
...
Bringing this back to my current project, I'm taking Interstella 5555 as a kind of personal challenge. The movie is very story-driven, but the main purpose of that story is still to be a visual accompaniment and mood enhancer for a dozen techno songs. If I try to critique it independently of that, I'm not going to get anywhere. I'm not sure exactly how I should approach the story for this sort of Let's Watch format, but I'm going to do my best to figure something out.
I think that's more than enough preamble. Put on your bubble helmets, strobe the lights, and follow me into Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem.
Before the movie itself begins, there's a few seconds of black-and-white footage from a Japanese awards ceremony or something, featuring the following (subtitled) quote:
““Musicians are magicians, that’s what I always say. I’ve always had this dream or hope since my childhood, and the dream itself came toward me. How should I explain this...I have all these lights in my head.””
I tried to dig around and find out who and when this is from, and apparently it's just...someone involved in the production of this movie. Which makes this seem a lot more pretentious than it otherwise would, but I'll still keep the words in mind and see if the movie gives them another layer of meaning.
The cartoonining begins! Title drop over a Dr. Who-ish spacewarp background! Then, we open on a spiral galaxy that may or may not be our own, looking in from outside as a celestial object shoots toward it, leaving a trail of blazing, space-warping exhaust.
"Interstella" appears to have been quite an understatement. What we're seeing is actually closer to Intergalaktik 3333: an 3nigmatic 3pic of the 3theric 3ternity.
We follow this superluminal meteor as it enters the spiral galaxy, passing some really beautifully detailed cosmic scenery. Including dense blue multi-hued star clusters, pulsing stellar nurseries, and magnificent dust cloud that looks like it might be inspired by the Eagle Nebula. It's accompanied by an atonal ambience that sounds less like a movie score and more like natural radio background.
This celestial slideshow skips over the long stretches of empty black nothingness, of course, but it manages to capture something of the scale and grandeur of space while omitting the coldness and sterility.
Honestly, if the movie was just this for 65 minutes that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
As we move through space, the natural radio sounds start to give way to something more tonal. It gets clearer and louder, giving us the sense that the faster-than-light object we're following is homing in on that signal, following it back to its source. The tune becomes a clear song as we enter its star system of origin - its 5tar 5ystem of 0rigin, one might say -and approach a planet with brightly colored rings and three large moons.
Track 1: "One More Time"
The source of the radio-broadcasted music turns out to be a live concert, and judging by the size of the venue we're listening to one of this planet's most popular bands. They're pretty humanlike, aside from the teal-colored skin. Meet lead vocalist Afro, guitarists Usagi and Sting, and drummer...erm, okay, maybe not all of them are quite as humanlike as the others.
Is he supposed to be deformed, or is this just normal morphodiversity for their species? A third sex, maybe? Another species within their hominid-equivalent genus? Well, for whatever reason the drummer is drawn like a Peanuts character while everyone else gets the glamorous pseudorealistic anime style, so he's named Charlie Brown.
Unlike most of the songs to come, "One More Time" is fully diegetic, with Afro's lips moving to the lyrics as he sings into the microphone and over the teal people airwaves. This sort of sets up false expectations for how this movie is going to work, but I'll talk about that once we've seen more of it; for now, I'll just say that this might serve a thematic purpose even if it's also kind of clumsy. Also, to make up for Charlie Brown the movie gives us this dazzling exterior shot of the concert hall and the alien city surrounding it:
The first thing it made me think of was a social insect colony, like complex paper wasp nests or termite mounds. Not biological-looking structures, but biogenic-looking ones. My second thought was the Machine Civilization from the Matrix movies, which...well, this movie came out the same year as "Matrix Revolutions," and the previous films only showed tiny glimpses of that, so it may not have been a direct inspiration. Still, there's a lot of commonalities, save that the softer edges and vibrant color palette give it a much friendlier vibe. Something I'll note is that while it does look friendly, it doesn't look inviting. Like a place that would be amazing to visit, but too far outside our human context to ever really get used to. It's a good world, but it's not meant for us.
That kinda goes against the very familiar concert hall interior with its very familiar stage, instruments, and moshed pit, of course. But it's still the vibe I get from the external city shots in isolation.
As the sequence continues, we also see some inside shots of teal people in houses and restaurants, watching or listening to the broadcast on their holographic crystal balls. Similar sort of "social insect hive" architectural vibe as the exteriors, but with more obviously humanoid-friendly furnishings and a more soothing colour scheme. I have more mixed feelings about their clothing, though.
On one hand, it doesn't match any human fashion paradigm that I can readily think of, which is good work on the character designers' part. On the other, unlike the architecture the clothes look like something that easily could have happened in Earth history, so it doesn't have the same otherworldly punch.
The band keeps singing. The fans keep dancing. The microphones keep translating the music into radio signals and bouncing them around the autmosphere, from whence they echo out into space and lose themselves in the electromagnetic background static of the universe. Then a weird visual thing happens, and we see each of the band members momentary silhouetted against human versions of themselves.
Is it going to turn out that these four have human doppelgangers on Earth who share their souls or something? It seems like it might be foreshadowing that, or something like it.
The final third of the song, when the music quiets down and the "music's got me feeling so free" repetitions pipe up, has us cut over to a towerlike military facility located in the same city. There are some big sensor arrays hard at work here, which suggests that the teal-people might not actually be that much more happy and carefree than us after all. On the other hand, the telemetry operators are all too busy headbanging along to the concert as they listen to the radio to pay attention to the screens, which suggests that their geopolitics are at least significantly less nerve-wracking than Earth's even if it isn't all sunshine and roses. On the downside, this means that none of them notice when their instruments detect an unidentified flying object inbound on their city at unbelievable speed.
A shark can track the smell of blood to its source even when it's been diluted throughout a mile's worth of seawater. The extragalactic traveller has picked a scent out from the cosmic radiant background, and homed in.
It's nice that the lifeguards don't normally have to pay much attention around these parts. But.
We return to orbit and see the object decelerate, shedding its blazing, trailing envelope to reveal a silvery, teardrop-shaped spaceship. It orients its sensors on the teal-people city, confirming that it's tracked the music to its source. On the vessel's shadowy bridge, its commander puts the signal onscreen.
That's a cool-looking bridge he's got. Albeit sort of impractically large and empty. Honestly, it almost looks like another dance club, which may be the artists' intent with the design.
The shadow-cloaked humanoid in command of this intergalactic ship watches and listens, their fingers twitching to the beat. Then, they step over to a console and press some buttons, a malevolent white grin briefly splitting the darkness of their face.
...
"Celebrate and dance so free. Music's got me feeling so free."
Just begging for it, weren't they?
Okay, sure, it's kind of laughably heavyhanded. But whether in spite or because of that, it does lay down some emotional pressure. Almost a horror movie like vibe, where the monster is about to do something premeditatively cruel to someone totally unsuspecting and wholesome. That same sort of sickening dread.
It doesn't make you feel it as intensely as a lot of other media that evokes the same thing. The garish "far-outness" and cartoon logic elements of these scifi circumstances are part of that, alongside the aforementioned overselling. But hey, it actually made me tense up a little instead of just laughing at it, so it's at least a partial success.
...
A small fleet of parasite craft detaches from the Shark and enters the atmosphere. One shuttle hovers in for a landing atop that military tower full of soldiers who aren't doing their jobs. Two others take up positions over the concert hall. All three disgorge squads of armed soldiers in full EV suits who quickly spread out and pursue their objectives.
They have an uncanny, jerky quickness to their movements. Along with the movie's very minimal sound effects, this gives the invaders an almost phantasmal quality. Also, I'm not sure if the blur effect is due to bad video quality or actually part of the animation; if the latter, then they have some sort of partial cloaking technology.
Inside the tower, one of the inattentive officers finally happens to spot the radar display and realizes that there are a bunch of unknown contacts literally on top of them. They panic and raise the alarm, but aren't able to do much more than that, as the invaders locate a strange fungus-like geothermal reactor under the tower and disable it.
Is that supposed to be an actual biotechnological organism they're using to power their city? It really looks like it, but it's hard to tell.
The tower, and much of the surrounding city, loses power and blacks out as the upbeat musical background of "One More Time" fades into sepulchral bell tones, and is then forcefully overtaken.
Track 2: "Aerodynamic"
Technically the churchbell like "outro" for the last track is actually the first few seconds of this one, but the way the movie's visuals accompany them you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise. As the more metal-ish high energy beats take over, the lights in the concert hall go off and alien soldiers start raining from the ceiling. The mass of fans in the dance pit have only moments to panic before the invaders spray the whole place with knockout gas.
One thing I didn't notice until now was that the concert hall is either built into a natural cave or sinkhole, or else was designed to resemble one from the inside. Those really look like natural cliffs that the attackers are spraying from.
Another squad rappels down onto the stage to surprise-surround the band members themselves, spraying them with the same gas and grabbing them off the floor. Usagi, Afro, and Charlie Brown are all quickly captured. Sting turns out to have some combination of faster reflexes and higher lung capacity, though, and manages to wriggle out of the circle and flee the stage before he can succumb. When two more aliens ambush him at the stadium exit, he surprises both them and myself with his martial arts prowess, disabling both abductors and fleeing out into the street.
Maybe Sting served in one of the teal person militaries before he was a famous techno guitarist. Or else he's just come fresh off of playing teal Freyd-Rautha Harkonnen in teal David Lynch's Dune adaptation, and still has the fightiness in his muscle memory.
He outruns the next team of soldiers who try to close in on him, and looks like he might actually manage to make it out into the city and lose them in the throngs as everything goes into high alert. The frantic electric banjo solo part of "Aerodynamic" accompanies his wild chase. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have thought to ditch his guitar; it's still strapped over his shoulder, and probably slowing him down a good bit. Honestly, that just makes his performance here all the more impressive. Behind him, other aliens appear out of the tranq-mist (okay yeah, they definitely have some kind of personal blur/partial cloak thing going on) carrying his bandmates over their own shoulders, glaring after him through their luminous visors.
Heh, I never realized that the electro-solo part of this song sounded so much like "Flight of the Bumblebee" until now. It takes hearing it being played over a chase scene to notice, I suppose.
Unfortunately for Sting, one of the aliens unpacks a sort of high tech crossbow and uses it to snipe him with a pellet infused with the same pink-coloured tranquilizer. These abductors might not be all that impressive in CQC, but this one at least proves to be a very good shot.
His collapse onto the pavement is timed with the banjo riff ending and being overtaken again by the metal beats. I do appreciate how they managed to turn the different parts of this one song into duelling leitmotifs.
The aliens regroup and place all four of the unconscious native musicians into containment pods that look like high tech coffins. A moment later they turn out to be very high tech coffins, as the abductors hit a few buttons and engage the pods' thrusters, letting them fly back into one of the dropships while the soldiers hastily return to the landing sites on foot. By the time the unconscious natives in the radar tower and concert hall start to wake back up, the abductors and abductees are well on their way into orbit.
Also, I missed it at first, but the aliens packed a larger abduction pod with the band's instruments as well. I guess they're going to anally probe some electric guitars and drums, then?
The parasite craft return to the mothership, where the troops relocate the abduction pods to the main hold. Back on the bridge, the commander watches their work via internal cameras with another sinister grin. Then, he spreads his arms and cackles, and we see enough of his silhouette for the villain's identity to be revealed as that of Dr. Ivo Robotnik.
I should have known he was behind this!
As Eggman and his minions escape the scene of the crime (and also the entire planet of the crime for that matter), one of the still-groggy men in the radar tower drags himself over to a console with emergency power still working and hits a button with a weird symbol on it that looks like an oddly shaped electric guitar.
Weird, it doesn't look like Sonic. I'm not sure who they'd call other than him for this situation though.
Also, the soldier who gasps out the distress call is another of Charlie Brown's basic phenotype.
I think I saw some others like them too, among the reawakening soldiers and concertgoers.
So, third sex, multiple surviving species of teal Homo spp., or just more physiological diversity than humans. Common enough to make up a very visible minority of the population, at least.
As "Aerodynamic" ends, we follow the signal that this Peanuts-type sent out. Somewhere out in space, a spaceship that looks like a strangely shaped electric guitar receives the transmission. This is the weirdest Sonic intro besides '06, but at least it's better executed.
End of part one. There will probably be four or five in total. Since this was supposed to be June's fast lane project, I'll try to get another part out every day or two until it's finished, so it at least won't go too far into July.
