Interstella 5555 — The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem 4K “Remaster” Review
I’ve wanted to review Daft Punk and Leiji Matsumoto’s 2003 music-and-anime collaboration Interstella 5555 for a long time now, so obviously jumped at the chance to review the new 4k “remastered” version for ANN. You can read my full review at the link below:
Although the review was based on a press screener, I did also attend my local cinema for the one-night-only showing to see if watching it on the big screen did anything to reduced the effect of the horrid AI-powered upscale. Some parts worked ok, it did a reasonable job of removing a lot of the noise and artifacts from the DVD source, but panning was super-jerky for reasons I explain in the article linked above, and the weird faces were still obvious.
I don’t really regret seeing the film again at the cinema (except for the eye-watering £20 ticket price), and clearly more than enough people wanted to see it too — I had to book an overspill showing at 8:30pm after the 7:30pm showing sold out. I do wish this had been a proper remaster though, not whatever the hell this was.
In the ANN articles, as a limitation of the ancient code that runs the website, my comparison images were a bit too small. I’ve uploaded slightly larger versions below, so you can have a better look at the differences between the 2003 original (left), and the 2024 AI-smeared upscale (right).
Thanks for readings, and I’ll be back again soon with a heap more things. I have around twenty articles I need to finish writing before the end of the year…
Kevin Cormack is a Scottish medical doctor, husband, father, and lifelong anime obsessive. He writes as Doctorkev at https://medium.com/anitay-official and appears regularly on The Official AniTAY podcast. You can also find him on Twitter @Herrdoktorkev. His accent is real.
