anime Interstella 5555 may be your most interesting and influential work.

Daft Punk, that of the mysterious robot helmets and conventional electronic hits, announced on Monday that they had parted ways. The group was on a hiatus, so it looked more like people who had tacitly ended the process just by creating the subtext. But it still represents the end of an era for a group whose most recent – and ultimately, final, 2013 launch Random access memories, won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

There is much to celebrate and recognize in Daft Punk’s 28-year career. But what has always stood out to me as its most interesting and influential release is not a show or an album: it is an anime. Interstella 5555: the 5 history of the 5ecret 5tar 5 system it may not be the duo’s most recognizable work, but it is glorious, a visual album-like project that brings together two incredible art forms together perfectly.

Interstella 5555 is a companion to the Daft Punk album Discovery, Daft Punk’s second record and his great success. Launched in 2001, Discovery features many of the songs for which the duo remains best known, such as “One More Time”, “Harder Better Faster Stronger” and “Digital Love”. In Daft Punk’s native France, Discovery it was triple-platinum; here in the USA, he won gold, with “Harder Better Faster Stronger” in particular finding a new life almost a decade later, courtesy of Kanye West’s interpolation in his hit “Stronger”.

It is a fun album, highly danceable and inspired by the disc, and has a strong sense of science fiction at its core. Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk had already modeled themselves after robots, after all, and Discovery it was his real proof of concept. Interstella 5555 creates a loose plot and lends beautiful visuals to this soundscape. The film, which lasts about an hour, was directed by Leiji Matsumoto, the creator of classic manga in the mid 1970s as Galaxy Express 999 and Space Battleship Yamato, both informed by science fiction from the 60s and 70s and the dream of space travel. Matsumoto initially created the different parts of the Interstella 5555 as separate video clips, each with a different song from the album. But, once interconnected, these videos created a comprehensive whole – something more magical than the sum of its very good parts.

In another galaxy, a pop band composed entirely of blue people with angelic blond hair is hunted by alien forces and abducted from their home planet. They are forced by the leader of these bad guys to perform for a fanatic stadium audience and produce more hit records – 5,555 of them, in fact. In some way, it will help the bad guy to rule the universe. Once the band finds this out, the members will be able to fight their captors and break free. So, in the end, we discovered that… it was all a young Daft Punk fan’s dream.

It sounds silly, which kind of is. But the combination of visuals and music was surprising at the time, something that I, as an elementary school student, had never conceived of. Anime, my favorite thing, could be defined as … real, popular, legitimately great music in English? Who knew? I watched it for the first time Interstella 5555 in the summer of 2001, when the Cartoon Network anime block Toonami aired after midnight; it was then shown in four “episodes”, as the final project would not be completed until 2003. My sister and I sat glued to the TV and stayed up until after bedtime to see the anime story of these alien pop artists singing some great ones hits of disco music. The movie was kind of shonen anime that we were used to watching after school and obsessing, a show with aliens and nonsensical evil schemes and the like. But what made this different was how it was not based on any strict dialogue or narrative. The videos were more about creating a mood, invoking the sensations that the music inspires and telling a story around them for a more attractive display.

I didn’t know until then that video clips were informed by my favorite visual medium. I had only seen the live-action that MTV always showed, never animated short films that were as fun to watch as they were to listen to, without any human involvement – pure art. (The Toonami block showed some video clips of Gorillaz after Interstella 5555, equally influential in two young anime nerds who have not yet developed a true musical taste.) Interstella 5555 debuted in Cannes in 2003, it has become a kind of obscurity. It is only legally available for broadcast through a subscription to the incredibly niche Qello Concerts service; a Blu-Ray was released in 2011, but finding new copies of it or the DVD is a crapshoot. The easiest way to assist today is to check the usual suspects. (I will leave this leg work for you.)

As a Daft Punk fan, this visual anime album is a must. And now that the pair has hung up their helmets and retired, there is no better time to watch some rare performances – even if they are lively.