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.

The ending credits indicates "everything is made by me". I love it!

It took 7 years the director to make this stop-motion animation which he studied on his own. It has fabulous quality and dark joking. If anyone laughes this passion as madness, I'll give him the finger.

One of favourite things is "Kunoko" grows out of some weird organic matter which is cultivated artificially, it's similar to mushroom but isn't. I really liked the grotesque design of that plantation's staff. Another one is a driver of elevator like a motorcycle gang.

The criteria of happiness changes depending on where you live. "Bad luck" for you can be an envy thing for someone in other places and situation.

I was confused at the early stages when I watched it while drinking hot chocolate. Be careful about it.

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!

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.

"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.