To say this supposed 4K remaster of one of my favorite movies of all time leaves me with mixed feelings would be an understatement. My initial excitement at hearing this one-of-a-kind collaboration between Daft Punk and their childhood hero, Leiji Matsumoto, would receive an international re-release was immediately tempered by the visuals accompanying the press release… Was this potentially SD-only digipainted film (hey, it was 2003, give poor Toei a break) about to be the victim of that most modern, insidious ailment: an AI upscale?

Whether INTERSTELLA 5555 ever had an original HD master is up for debate, as 2011's much-maligned Blu-ray release was nothing but an upscale of the 2003 DVD, complete with egregious artifacts and terrible color banding. I first saw the film in an independent movie theatre in the mid-2000s, and I recall thinking it seemed like they were projecting a DVD-quality image at the time. The general consensus on Blu-ray forums seems to be that either Toei lost the HD masters or that they never existed, and the basis of every release so far has been a (now lost) SD NTSC source converted to PAL DVD, complete with frame-skipping to bring a 30fps signal to 25fps. This cutting of every sixth frame explains the juddery motion in certain Blu-ray scenes, and why, up until now, the best way to watch INTERSTELLA 5555 was with the increasingly scarce region-free 2003 PAL DVD release from EMI.

Before we get to my assessment of this newest version, let me explain why I love INTERSTELLA 5555 so much in the first place. For one, the album Discovery is a stunning, eclectic collection of songs that synthesize rock, pop, funk, and electronica into one effervescent, invigorating whole. While Daft Punk's debut album Homework and later releases Human After All and Random Access Memories feature standout tracks, almost every Discovery song is a classic. Everyone knows the unbeatable opening quartet of tracks "One More Time, "Aerodynamic," Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," and "Digital Love," but later songs "Crescendolls," "Superheroes," and "Face to Face" are amongst my top Daft Punk tracks of all time.

Daft Punk members Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo grew up in France watching localized versions of Leiji Matsumoto's anime, primarily Captain Harlock. They credit this for influencing their work. While Matsumoto himself isn't INTERSTELLA 5555's character designer, the entire film is modeled very closely after his aesthetic — from tall, wispy, and ethereal female lead Stella to tiny button-nosed drummer Baryl. Heroic lead Shep's Flying V guitar-shaped spaceship is a very Matsumoto touch, too. I also watched Captain Harlock as a child on UK cable TV, and so I share a degree of nostalgia towards the “Matsumoto Look.”

Toei Animation really brought their A-game to INTERSTELLA 5555's visuals — it's a riot of fantastical color, a whimsical alien world reminiscent of the 1950s and '60s classic sci-fi. Each of the main characters is distinguished by superbly observed animation, especially during the many musical performances. Stella deftly weaves around the stage, playing her guitar around her more stationary bandmates. A couple of pastel-shaded dream sequences evoke a shimmering world of iridescent imagination, perfectly accompanying the endlessly creative musical score.

For a movie without dialogue, it's astonishing that INTERSTELLA 5555 tells its (admittedly simple) story as well as it does. While each song's accompanying video can stand alone (four segments were released alongside the associated Discovery singles prior to the film's release), they lead into each other seamlessly. The only concession to conventional movie storytelling is the addition of a few sparse sound effects when appropriate. We get acquainted with each of our characters and their inter-relationships purely through the media of music and movement. It's all so wonderfully clever and fun that it still makes me giddy.

Spaceship pilot Shep is another typically Matsumoto creation — a selflessly heroic, square-jawed man who's deeply in love with Stella (not that he's ever met her; he's a fan whose bedroom is covered in Stella posters). Shep's attempted rescue and sacrifice in the middle of the movie gives it an odd structure, but it's not unusual for a Matsumoto hero to expire well before the closing credits. Even though we hardly get to know him, the videos for twin tracks "Something About Us" and "Voyager" hit hard emotionally.

Through not-so-subtle imagery, Daft Punk uses INTERSTELLA 5555 to draw attention to the way the music industry first manufactures, then abuses its talent, bleeding them dry for profit and ejecting them (literally sacrificing them to a lava pit at one point) when their stars fade. Our blue-skinned quartet is brainwashed, then their skin is painted various shades of human, made to wear mind-controlling sunglasses, and forced to play music and sign autographs until they drop from exhaustion. It's a rather on-the-nose allegory. According to INTERSTELLA 5555, the reason such famous musical artists such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Janis Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Jimmy Page met with success was because they were aliens captured and brainwashed by the main antagonist, the Earl de Darkwood. That's hilariously goofy.

"Veridis Quo" is an odd gothic-tinged track that sees our heroes confront the evil mastermind and his army of creepy robot cultists in a lava-filled secret lair, the centerpiece of which is a strange sacrificial altar powered by music industry-awarded golden discs. It's probably best not to question the plot by this point. Everything explodes very satisfactorily in "Short Circuit," and the story comes to a proper resolution in the excellent "Face to Face," which features some really fun visuals and a sense of hope for the future. The closing track, "Too Long," at ten minutes really is too long… but I think we can allow Daft Punk some leeway for indulgence at the end of such a unique and entertaining movie. If you have any appreciation for Daft Punk or the works of Leiji Matsumoto and you haven't already seen INTERSTELLA 5555, then I strongly suggest you see it any way you can…

Except perhaps not via this 4K abomination.

Look, I get it. By modern standards, the available materials were of poor quality, and if no HD masters were forthcoming, and the execs demanded money was to be made with a re-release, then something had to be done. Unfortunately, Toei decided a crime against art, music, and human decency was in order. I'm heartbroken to report to you, dear reader, that INTERSTELLA 5555's 4K “restoration” is one of the worst examples of violence towards art I've seen in a long time.

Do you remember a few years ago that story about the Elías García Martínez fresco Ecce Homo in the Spanish town of Borja that was “restored” by an amateur who clearly had no idea what she was doing? That's exactly what this “remaster” is. This release was run through what looks like an AI program that had no idea what it was doing, and predictably, it made an absolute godawful mess. I can hardly summon the words to describe this crime against all that is holy, so let some pictures do the talking. Below are paired screencaps, each with an image captured from the 2003 DVD on the left, and a capture from the remaster on the right. Judge for yourself.

I'm almost willing to leave this with the statement, “The prosecution rests, m'lord,” but we have to consider how this could have gone so wrong. When used, generative AI upscaling is surely a last-ditch effort to wring blood from a stone without expending any amount of human effort or monetary investment. It's a cheap, nasty, lazy, and offensive way of trying to generate extra information where there was none to begin with. This is what you get when you attempt to upscale a deinterlaced 4:3 480i/480p resolution (640x480 = 307,200 pixels) to 4:3 4K (2880x2160 = 6,220,800 pixels) — that's over 20 times the amount of source information. At that point, you need to start making shit up, and that's exactly what it looks like here: a dumb algorithm hallucinating mindless, meaningless garbage without any appreciable human oversight. It doesn't understand what it sees, but humans do, the people paying to see what amounts to algorithm-vomited cinematic sludge. I cannot imagine for one moment that Matsumoto would have approved of this bastardization.

This version of INTERSTELLA 5555 no longer looks like it sprung from the hands of human creators. Every line is either over-sharpened, thickened, or erased, while facial features blur into one another like something from the deepest nightmares of George Romero. Rather than improving detail, this idiot algorithm deletes and smooths it over, scraping sandpaper over delicate textures before smearing them with an inch of Vaseline for good measure. The original organic human warmth that shone through soft textures, gentle lighting, and subtle color gradients is steamrolled over by a destructive algorithmic barbarian with no concept of the meaning of art or human effort.

At least the music remains unmolested by unthinking machines of mass destruction. If you can turn off the part of your brain that screams internally when confronted by misshapen monstrosities, it's still the same wonderful film. I can't help thinking they would have been better off just linking cinema projectors to a DVD player like they seemed to do 20 years ago. I heartily recommend sticking to an older version of INTERSTELLA 5555 because if this abomination somehow sells, they will keep doing this, and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves. Actually, that's a lie. INTERSTELLA 5555 teaches us that evil business moguls are the ones to blame for the entertainment industry's amoral ills. How truly prophetic.