Daft Punk’s 2003 Anime Film Is in Theaters Today – Those Who Were There Recall Its Creation: ‘It Was Magical, For Real’
Today (Dec. 12) Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem is screening in more than 800 theaters in 40 countries. Daft Punk's former manager and label boss recall its making.
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Today (Dec. 12), Daft Punk’s 2003 anime film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem is screening in more than 800 theaters in 40 countries. While some of these theaters will host additional screenings over the weekend, this cinematic event is largely a one night only affair.
And in the numerology-centric Daft Punk universe — the group announced its breakup on 2/22/21 and livestreamed Interstella 5555 on Twitch exactly a year later, 2/22/22 — this screening happening on 12/12/24 is obviously not accidental.
“I think it’s a just a fun way to find a date to release something,” says Pedro Winter, who managed Daft Punk from 1996 to 2008. “Most of the time we do things for fun.”
A quarter-century ago, creating an animated companion piece to the duo’s 2001 Discovery seemed like one such fun idea. The project would, however, also become an expensive, multi-year process that was a huge undertaking in an era when animation was still done by hand and resulted in a film that was only seen in full by a select few.
“I let you imagine the face of the accountant when you tell him you want to produce 14 videos that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each,” says Winter.
Animated by legendary Japanese anime artist Leiji Matsumoto in collaboration with Japan’s Toei Animation studio and scored by Discovery, Interstella 5555 was created as a series of music videos set to each of the album’s 14 perfect songs. (See an exclusive clip of the remastered film’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” section below.)
Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo conceived of the idea for the project, which tells the story of an evil music industry tycoon who kidnaps and brainwashes an alien rock group, transforms them into cookie cutter pop stars, brings them back to Earth and weasels them to the top of the charts. (The film “was written 25 years ago…. and it’s so relevant in 2025,” says Winter.)
While his memories of the creation process are reasonably hazy 25 years on, Winter says he’s pretty sure Bangalter and de Homem-Christo “produced the music first and then wrote the film around it. They needed the sound as a skeleton.” Once they had the script, they had to get Matsumoto onboard, knowing the artist – whose manga series Space Pirate Captain Harlock had been turned into an animated show the Daft Punk members watched as kids – might get their vision.
“While on a promo trip in Japan they met with Leiji Matsumoto, the legendary creator of the Space Pirate Captain Harlock anime to discuss their project with him,” says Emmanuel de Buretel, the founder of Because Music and former head of Virgin Records who signed Daft Punk to the latter label. “He was excited and quickly agreed to work with them on a manga movie inspired by Discovery.”
The project would be expensive, but Bangalter and de Homem-Christo had the will to make it happen and “pitched the concept themselves to Virgin Records,” recalls Winter. “Luckily the head of Virgin at the time was de Buretel, the only major label’s CEO who could understand Daft Punk’s vision… He was the one who fought and managed to get the approval from the whole EMI group.”
Ordering 14 custom-made anime music videos from one of the world’s great masters of the style may have seemed like a flight of fancy to the accounting department — but then again, at one point the idea of two guys playing electronic music while dressed as robots probably did too.
“Great artists are rare,” says de Buretel. “Great, hardworking and humble artists are even rarer. Visionaries like these are few and far between, and you can’t help but be inspired and motivated by their vision and work ethic.”
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo initially planned to finance the film themselves, although Virgin ended up fronting the money for a project that de Buretel says “very quickly became highly complex and costly, since they had to fly to Japan every month to finish editing, while also promoting the project. We, at Virgin, decided to help them finance it to finish quickly — that was a result of really believing in the project and their vision.” (Winter says “Virgin records was putting up the money, but at the end it was Daft Punk who paid the bill.”)
There was also one major benefit to Virgin helping with the financing: “They also made a very nice concession to do another album,” says de Buretel. (2005’s Human After All would complete Daft Punk’s three-album run on Virgin.)
Once financing was sorted, work on Interstella began in Japan, where Matsumoto worked in collaboration with animation studio Toei Animation. “We all went to Tokyo in early 2000,” recalls Winter. “We met Leiji Matsumoto at his place. It was magical, for real. He was a living legend. We grew up with his characters on French TV. He loved the robot characters of Daft Punk. They were speaking the same language; it was just amazing to see the band and Leiji getting along so well.”
A group of creators who may have seemed worlds apart found they actually had a lot in common. De Buretel calls the film “a blend of two cultural movements exploding at the same time, electronic music and anime. The modernity of the concept: using science fiction to explore themes of artists’ exploitation, could only have been done by such powerhouse thinkers as Leiji and Daft Punk.”
Daft Punk creative director Cédric Hervet soon joined the team to help develop the screenplay and the characters. While the idea was to launch the film at the same time as the album, that was not to be, with the film ultimately released two years after Discovery came out in February of 2001. (The album spent 30 weeks on the Billboard 200 across spans in 2001 and 2015.)
“Animation is such a long-term process,” says Winter, who recalls “receiving faxes from Toei Animation every week” with updates. “I loved the way the characters evolved, how the whole story took life,” he says.
Clips for the album singles “One More Time,” “Aerodynamic,” “Digital Love,” and “Harder Better Faster Stronger” were released first, and the complete film screened at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, along with a limited run in approximately 30 French theaters. A DVD of the full project them came out in late 2003. (“The animated House Musical,” the DVD’s cover reads.)
But until now, Interstella 5555 has never had a wide cinematic release in its full, hour-long form. The screenings are happening in partnership with Trafalgar Releasing, which specializes in special event cinema distribution and also worked on the 2023 cinematic releases of Taylor Swift‘s The Eras Tour concert film and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé.
The remastered version showing globally today has been, de Buretel says, “upgraded to fit current standards and give all fans the opportunity to engage in it.” He adds that this global event is an opportunity for fans to “discover and re-discover the group’s magic artistically and sonically,” to celebrate Matsumoto, who passed away last year at age of 85, and to stir up some fun and celebrate a work that, like so much of Daft Punk’s output, was ahead of its time.
“The project seemed difficult 24 years ago,” says de Buretel. “It probably seems straightforward today, but it was very risky and hard to wrap your head around at the time. I think that’s why it is a cult movie now.”
