Junk Head

Phil Tippett's Mad God has absolutely nothing on this film.

I'm not going to bore you with a summary of the story like everyone else. You're here because you're obviously interested, so that's pointless.

Junk Head is an incredible universe, extremely reminiscent of Tsutomu Nihei's worlds, the maker of BLAME! And Knights of Sidonia in both architecture and character style. If you know, you know.

Endless sprawling cities full of intrigue and mystery, bizarre locals, and even stranger creatures around ever corner.

The claymation is beyond spectacular, I don't know exactly how, but it's almost got a motion blur very subtly when things move which really give them a lifelike feel, and the camera angles are insane. Characters will be walking down a hallway, and the camera will rotate from their backs to their face. This sounds mundane, but the way it's done is incredible. It's almost difficult to believe human hands crafted this film, but the 'making of' is out there.

I will say the ending is easily the weakest part of the film. I won't spoil anything, but it feels like it just ended out of the blue when things were getting good. Like stopping a season of a show on episode 6 out of 8, but even that's part of the mystery and intrigue, so I didn't even knock it for that.

Ultimately, this was a wild and violent ride, a masterpiece of it's craft, and if anything I've said hits you in your intrigue feels, you should absolutely go out of your way to seek this film out.

"Junk Head" is a tough movie to describe because it isn't really a movie. It's less a story and more a deep dive into the director's subconscious where weird and disturbing things lurk.

In this sense the film feels a bit like "Eraserhead" in that it's the decidedly odd product of one man's imagination while it also feel reminiscent of "Brazil" - which you could describe in the same terms.

The whole movie takes place in this Escher like subterranean maze of voids, passageways and arching bridges. The inhabitants haven't seen the light of day for many generations to the extent that they are little more than cave fish with legs. At the same time isolation has turned them almost cult-like; not that any of this is explained.

Instead the film is best enjoyed for its dedicated ambition, imaginative delights and conjuring up of a troglodytic realm far removed from us in space and time.

You may well emerge from the darkened cinema blinking and confused but you won't forget that you've experienced something even if you can't quite put your finger on what that something was.

In the distant future, mankind begins research on clones that live underground in search of lost genetic information.

"Junk Head" began its life as a short film in 2014, with Takahide Hori essentially making the entire movie himself – from writing to directing to sculpting and so on. Not surprisingly, it was a great success just begging for a longer representation of this world and its style. Three years later, Hori is back and again more or less running the show solo, even creating the music. Love it or hate it, you cannot help but respect the daunting amount of time that went into this.

What we have is a dystopian world, something like an inverted "Wallace and Gromit" where everyone is either dead or at least dead on the inside. Love, friendship and everything that makes life worth living is long gone. For this reviewer, the film seems very much like throwback to the 1990s when there was a steady undercurrent of nihilism and the idea of humans as machines in both film and music.

The music of "Junk Head" seems very inspired by the nihilistic music of the 1990s, the techno-industrial strain that went mainstream with Nine Inch Nails, but had dozens – even hundreds – of similar bands who were taking the concepts of despair even further. The music and films had a Nietzschean streak, and "Junk Head" picks up where that decade left off. If there is any doubt about this, we have to look no further to the humorous reappropriation of a classic Nietzsche idea, "God is dead… and we killed him." The world is not completely hopeless, however. There are hints that a "tree of life" exists in an area called Kaapvaal. This may be one of the more clever, subtle touches of the film's script. Most likely the name "Kaapvaal" means nothing to 99% of the people who will see the film. But a quick search reveals that it is the name for a section of the search located in southeast Africa. Anyone who is familiar with basic anthropology will know that the evolutionary "tree of life" has humanity beginning in southeast Africa. Rather than say "Kenya" or some other familiar country, Hori cleverly used an obscure name that would make the region timeless to changing national boundaries.

"Junk Head" is great fun, and a welcome addition to the growing world of adult animation. Unlike the recent "Anomalisa", this is a story for adults that blends fantasy, science fiction and humor. And, despite its dystopian themes, never manages to be depressing. We even get pixilated feces for some reason, which is always good. "Junk Head" screens at the Fantasia International Film Festival on July 3, 2017 and is destined for great things.

Heavily, wonderfully influenced by BLAME! (Blam!), by Tsutomu Nihei. Junk Head though, is much more whimsical, and delightful than the nihilism of Blame! (I recommend both). The creature design is fantastical, lighthearted, and at the same time, grotesque, and endearing. The story itself is more a series of set pieces, but that hardly makes it different from most modern movies. Just enjoy the trials, and tribulations of a small cyborg in an utterly unfamiliar world, populated by creative, inventive, scary captivating adversaries, and companions. On a side note, I do highly recommended, Blame!, the manga, and the movie that is based on the Electrofishers chapters of the manga.

From japan. Stop motion animation. In the future, humans have manipulated their genes so heavily, that they have lost the ability to reproduce. So they go study the life forms that can still reproduce. The marigans! In an underground labrynth. It has a sense of humor, where they fight over silly things, and accidentally poke each other with sticks. Two headed monsters that chase him. And poop... or is that vomit ? With huge sex organs. And when someone talks about going on a long and dangerous journey, husband and wife both start giggling... for no reason. This had started as a thirty minute short film released in 2013, and was later made into a full length feature. It starts out very captivating, but the story gets a bit slower later on. Very creative world of various beings, and I love the low, mumbling language they all use. One race morphs into trees. At one point, the kids use his head as a soccer ball. Fun stuff. Observing the various races and discovering what they all do was just as interesting to me as the actual storyline. Written, directed, and voiced by takahide hori. I'm sure that I missed many important parts of the film... i'll definitely need to see this again! The english subtitles are well done. Currently showing on kanopy. Written and directed by takahide hori. Be sure to stick around for the closing credits.. they show the photographer setting up an moving the stop motion sets and figures. So cool!