Junk Head

Junk Head crawled into my eye socket like a 90s European art film that you'd stumble on at 2am on Channel 4 but also somehow like a Jan Svankmajer remix of 1980s British children's series Trap Door. Tonally it's somehow both tons of existing things and something completely new. Both disturbing and very silly, beautiful and very disgusting, hopefully and pessimistic and so on. Fundamentally it just needs watching. Sadly it's also very much one of those "one arty bloke's undiluted vision" projects as well so it's massively self-indulgent, suffers deeply from mission creep and is structurally hugely flawed. It doesn't for example, end, which I think most stories should do. I hope one day it might.

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.

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.

Since it took four years to reach Finnish theaters, I'm guessing this is one of those situations where the pandemic just gave new life to a movie which would have otherwise.not received much in the way of distribution.

The setup is that mankind has been immortal for a long time, but at the expense of our capability to reprocreate. When a pandemic starts to kill people en masse, there is a sudden need to replenish the population, so our hero is sent underground, among the marigan to find the one creature they could identify as having genitalia.

The marigan have been living apart from humans for a very long time and have built their society, although many of them are "wild". They don't follow the usual patterns of species, but will instead evolve in wildlly different ways.

This is the world into which our hero is plunged. He loses his body immediately and his head is placed into a robotic body, which brings its own set of difficulties.

The plot is just bad. Things just happen until the movie just ends. It almost feels like the director just didn't have the time or motivation to make the third act for the film.

Despite this, I did enjoy it. The weirdness of the world does carry the film pretty far. The monster design does remind me of something, but I'm not sure of what. Maybe some demonic beings from Hellblazer or something.

The world is claustrophobic and unfamiliar. Dangers seem to lurk everywhere, but at the same time some people have been living there for hundreds of years, so you can apparently get accustomed to it. While the world certainly is artificial, it also seems to grow like some sort of a living being. No-one seems to have any idea about how big it actually is or how things actually work. Certain people just have found themselves working on jobs, even though they might not really know why those jobs are even there.

So, all in all, if you are one of those people who want a cohesive story, this is not for you, but if you visuals and the art of stop-motion animation are your thing, this is worth checking out.

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.