By skyforbes 
So this is a bit of a departure from the usual anime that I review. Though, as a stop-motion animated movie, made in Japan almost singlehandedly by first-time Japanese director Takehide Hori, it should count as anime, shouldn’t it? Inspired by Makoto Shinkai’s essentially single-handedly produced short anime film Voices of a Distant Star, Hori decided, at around the age of 40, to make his own stop-motion animated short, despite having zero filmmaking experience. Over four years, he made the short Junk Head 1, released in 2013, for which he received international acclaim and recognition at various film festivals. This inspired him to expand his short into a full-length feature, with only a small team to assist him. Junk Head, a 101-minute film produced painstakingly in stop-motion and released in its final form in 2021, was the remarkable result. And I mean remarkable.
What Hori has achieved is nothing short of a singularly bizarre, grotesque, disquieting, yet compelling and entertaining fantasy adventure. Taking design cues from Blame! artist Tsutomu Nihei in terms of scope and character design, while utilising a kind of surreal brutalist architecture similar to certain episodes of Girls’ Last Tour, Hori conjures a grey, crumbling subterranean world filled with monsters and strangely humorous weirdos. At some point in the far future, mankind has conquered immortality at the cost of reproduction. A lone human explorer is sent into the depths of a subterranean labyrinth to investigate the proliferation of a race of artificial lifeforms — the “Marigans” — and discover the secret of their reproductive success. Suffice to say, things go very wrong for him, almost immediately. And by that, I mean he’s decapitated before he even lands at the bottom of the impossibly deep fissure where the Marigans’ almost infinitely expansive city lies.
Rescued by a bumbling trio of black-rubber clad, gas mask-wearing oddballs, our protagonist Parton (or, at least his head) is taken to a bizarre-looking doctor who builds him a new cybernetic body. Parton is amnesiac and vulnerable as he gets lost in the underground labyrinth, and finds himself preyed upon by various upsettingly toothy, wriggly monstrosities. There’s liberal use of bright red liquid in this production, which illustrates how brutal and unforgiving life is for the underground Marigans, as they’re stalked daily by multi-limbed things with gaping maws and knives for legs. One Marigan looks like a cross between The Guardians of the Galaxy’s Groot and The Last of Us’ Clickers. Shudder. The creature design in this film is exceptionally disturbing.
Even Parton himself, in the brief flashback we see of his life on the surface, is quite unsettling. It seems the surviving humans of this age use synthetic whole-body prosthetics to interact (though only over a VR internet interface), and their shrivelled bodies are hidden from view. They look like soulless mannequins, and Parton’s “real” face is pale, with milky eyes and a black respirator covering his mouth and nose. He looks, disturbingly, like one of the Toclafane from Doctor Who Season 3’s Last of the Time Lords, who interestingly were also the wizened remains of far-future humanity.
Parton blunders from one mishap to the next, his poor body getting smashed up on multiple occasions as he is repeatedly attacked/falls down caverns etc. At one point he even loses his ability to speak and is forced to become a mute janitor in a robotic body, suffering the indignity of being remamed “Junkers”. One particularly long stretch of the film during this period is told almost entirely without dialogue, which is incredibly effective. If anything, I’m reminded of Shaun Acker’s great 2009 “stitchpunk” movie 9, itself an expansion of an earlier short film. Junkers attempts, in vain to make a delivery of “Mashrooms” (which are wriggly fungus/finger-like growths harvested from apparently living human/Marigan torsos which seem to feel pain as they are severed), but finding his way back to his adoptive village beset with constant obstacles.
Filled with dark visual humour, I found myself cackling at some extremely disconcerting moments of gross body horror and black as pitch schadenfreude. Not everyone Parton meets in the underground is mean to him (in fact he makes some wonderfully reliable friends), but there are some really unpleasant characters, not all of them slavering monsters. They all live in a vividly realised world of deep chasms, impossibly tall edifices, maze-like corridors and the detritus of a civilisation barely scraping by. Although at times the colour palette is so grey as to be almost monochrome, it makes those brief splashes of bright colour even more dramatic. Once Parton learns of how the Marigans reproduce, it’s such a bizarre concept, it’s like something out of a Junji Ito manga.
Despite a generally slow-ish pace, there are some quite incredible moments of action that I can’t believe were filmed by someone who was essentially “learning on the job”. The blu-ray comes with a fascinating “making of” documentary that details the insane amount of dedication, craft and skill that was required in the production of this obvious labour of love. It’s well worth checking out after experiencing the film. I certainly don’t think Junk Head is for everyone, I wasn’t even sure it would be for me, but as I’m reviewing the upcoming prequel Junk World at its upcoming premiere at Scotland Loves Anime in Edinburgh next month, I thought I’d better see the original. I’m glad I did. My only real complaint is that it ends quite abruptly following a climactic battle, leaving the rest of the story incomplete. Takehide Hori has announced that Junk Head is but the first of a trilogy, so if Junk World is a prequel, it means that the continuation of Parton’s story won’t be with us for several years yet.
Junk Head
Director: Takehide Hori
Writer: Takehide Hori
Based on: Junk Head 1 (2013 animated short) by Takehide Hori
Character design: Takehide Hori
Music: Takehide Hori and Yoshiki Kondo
Worldwide premiere: 23rd July 2017 (Fantasia Film Festival)
UK distributor: Anime Limited
UK premiere: 29th November 2021
UK blu-ray release: 18th December 2023
Runtime: 101 minutes
Languages: Gibberish with English subtitles
BBFC rating: 15
Learn more about Junk Head (2021) — Random Movie Review