The film is essentially an hour-long music video of Daft Punk’s entire Discovery (2001) album, which is arguably their magnum opus and my second favourite album of theirs. Discovery is officially recognized by many as a concept album, so this hour-long feature could theoretically be viewed as the concept coming to fruition. A collaboration with Toei Animation and director Matsumoto Leiji comes a wacky, vivid and audibly perfect hour-long anime that any Daft Punk fan should definitely watch.
Narrative-wise, it’s pretty straightforward, and often feels quite empty. It follows the events that happen after a famous alien music band consisting of avatar-blue humanoids with mustard-yellow hair get kidnapped by a wealthy and greedy business mongol who intends on stealing their music to sell it to the people on Earth. You could probably scrutinize the visuals for hours and pull out some subliminal poppycock, but in reality, it’s just there to serve as a visual surrogate for your imagination as you listen to the outstanding soundtrack. The entire film plays all the songs in DP’s Discovery, in order of the tracks in the album—meaning the widely successful and well-known “One More Time” is the opening track of this feature. There are way too many tracks to cover all, so I’ll review all the notable ones in short one-liner sentences:
“One More Time” is definitely a favourite of mine from theirs and immediately starts this feature off at a very high note, it’s catchy chorus and trademark Daft Punk dance beat immediately keeps you hooked and bobbing your head; the second track, “Aerodynamic”, has these exhilarating electric guitar chords to keep emotion high as the extraterrestrial band scrambles for safety; the fourth track, “Harder Better Faster Stronger”, a song that frankly needs no introduction. Popularised by Kanye West’s sampling in “Stronger”, I guarantee that anyone who listens to any amount of music has ran across this song once before; the sixth track, “Night Vision”, with its subtle, slow and soothing notes with surprisingly expressive emotion soaks its respective scene with everything it needs to leave an impression; “Something About Us”, the 9th track of the album, and hands down my favourite song from the whole project. Its extremely enjoyable beat and ironic chorus about love spoken from a robotic tone will surely leave you echoing the refrain; and finally, the last notable track of the feature, “Veridis Quo”. Something so special about this that voids all plausible descriptors I can come up with for it—it’s just something you have to listen to for yourself.
Overall: 7/10 || Enjoyment: 8/10
Daft Punk make mostly electronic music, and were part of the French house movement in the 90s. Their innovative usage of synthesizers and real life instruments set themselves apart from all the other French house producers of their time, and their superb blends of a smorgasbord of genres make their music easily accessible to almost all individuals. While you may not like “Something About Us” as much as I did, you probably found “Get Lucky” catchy, or the Weeknd’s new “Starboy” enjoyable as well—Daft Punk are one of those rare artists that have a little something for just about everyone.
I sometimes find it difficult to express my love for Daft Punk effectively, and sometimes I feel like it’s not necessarily because the right words don’t come to me, but more so that people are quick to dismiss them as your generic DJ whose music is “lifeless”, “repetitive”, and “all sounds the same”. Maybe I can agree to a certain extent sometimes, I mean, no way am I not going to call Robot Rock or Veridis Quo not “repetitive”, but there is a certain intricacy and delicacy in Daft Punk’s music that make them so special to me, and so different from all the other DJs I hear about in the media these days. Random Access Memories is my favourite Daft Punk album, but Discovery is second only by a very small margin; the trippy and vivid visuals of this music video brought to life by Toei Animation have done Discovery justice as far as PMVs go, I think. There’s just something about this.
I hope this review was informative and helpful.
