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| Images courtesy of Gaga Corp. |
Junk Head (2017) started life as a thirty minute short film that garnered a lot of attention for its mixture of stylized cute characters and grimy bio-punk aesthetic. Director Takahide Hori first dipped his toes into filmmaking at age forty, deciding that he could make a piece of art mostly alone if he was determined enough. While Hori definitely employed the help of a select few artisans, the bulk of Junk Head was created by him. He painstakingly took thousands of photos for the stop-motion animation, created the dolls, provided much of the voice work, composed the score, did the editing, and so-on. At the end of the film it is amusing to see the credits whiz by with the name Takahide Hori attached to most of them. It was a labor of love, accomplished over seven years, and it shows with how in-depth and intricate the world-building is and how whimsical and personal it feels.
The film is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are unable to reproduce but live on through advanced technology and cybernetics. However, in the dark and gloomy underworld, there is a thriving community of beings cloned from human genetic material that are able to procreate and create new life organically. A cyborg from the surface is sent to the underground to get information about the creatures who dwell there, and hopefully unlock the secret of creating life to bring back to the surface.
Unfortunately, the cyborg's initial plans get messed up and he ends up needing a new body. Luckily, a doctor of sorts in the underground is able to cobble together a new one, and using this new form, the now tiny (and adorable) white robot must finish his mission. The denizens of the deep hail this bot as some sort of god figure and as the story progresses "god" is given different bodies with different abilities. The parallels to religions, specifically rebirth/reincarnation, are noticeable, but it's more subtext than text.
The world Junk Head depicts is a dusty, rusty, mechanical junk yard filled with terrifying monstrosities and quirky characters. There is a lot of gore and blood as many of the creatures are toothy predators with a taste for flesh, but at the same time there is a lot of whimsy mixed in as well. Hori seems to have a wry sense of humor, and even though the world can be horrifying and oppressively bleak he never misses a chance to throw in some humor to lighten the mood. The so-called "god" protagonist is at the mercy of luck and happenstance often being swept up in situations he has no control over. Survival of the fittest is the law of the land.
Stop-motion animation is becoming somewhat of a rarity in the age of CGI, but Junk Head is at the top of the pile. The impossibly intricate backgrounds are outstanding, and the animation of the characters is smooth and mesmerizing. Hori animated a multitude of bizarre otherworldly creatures and it's a treat to see what will pop out of the murky shadows next. It would have been easy to only focus on the visual aspects of the film, but the writing and character work is excellent too, and I found myself crying over these lovable weirdos a few times. The music is mostly industrial ambient pieces with a few rousing songs when the action gets heavy. One of the more interesting choices is that the language everyone speaks is a highly processed version of Japanese, jumbled around until it sounds like gibberish. It is a little off-putting at first but it grows on you quickly.
Junk Head is a bio-mechanical cyberpunk masterpiece, the blood, sweat, and tears of a single artist brought to life in astonishing clarity, and it would be a travesty if this doesn't get seen by more audiences.
