Stop-Motion-Ani-May-Tion!: Junk Head (Dir Takehide Hori, 1h40m, 2021)

The business of stop-motion animation is often a solitary task. Nick Park's A Grand Day Out took the now veteran animator six years to make the short film, single-handedly. Blood Tea and Red String would take American animator Christiane Cegavske over a decade to animate the painstaking, Gothic worlds of her feature film. Even with teams the size of Aardman and America's Studio Laika, the medium does not lend itself to fast work; even with a Hollywood budget behind it, Curse of the Wererabbit, Wallace and Gromit's big screen debut, averaged three seconds of animation per day. To make a feature is complex enough, given the glacial pace of production. To do it largely alone may seem like madness.

Enter, thus, Takehide Hori, and, astonishing as it sounds, his directorial debut, Junk Head (2021); to consider Junk Head as Hori's film is to undersell exactly how much work he did on the film. Hori is entirely self-taught as an animator, beginning production of the prototypal Junk Head in his forties. This alone would be a feat, but Hori did almost everything in the film's production on his own, building its entire cast of puppets, editing, and animating much of the film single-handedly, until taking on a small team (consisting of just four animators) to make the film under his direction, comprising of nearly 150,000 still photographs. Behind the scenes, Hori voices most of the film's characters-though little of their dialogue is intelligible (and none of it, shared with fellow animator, Atsuko Miyake, is in Japanese). Hori even shares soundtracking duties for the film's electronic score.

All of this is very noble; Hori himself citing fellow Japanese film-maker, Makoto Shinkai's Voices of a Distant Star (2002), another solo animation project as his inspiration, but without the vision to match, Junk Head would be a mere curio. What it is, is a descent into a bizarre, strange, and thought-provoking world that calls to mind  fantastical visions of other worlds, such as Fantastic Planet (1973), and the works of Terry Gillam. Against opening titles that tell of humanity's strange fate, trading quasi-immortality for fertility, and expeditions below to find the mysterious creatures, the Marigans that could solve all of this, so we are confronted with a sense of Hori's vivid imagination, and the pure scale of it. The sets are on a scale to rival Aardman at their most ambitious, this opening shot taking us up from the subterranean bowels of this world to meet our protagonist, Parton, who will soon be making the reverse trip downwards.

Parton (left, voiced by director Takehide Hori) and one of Hori's world's many unusual characters

His expedition does not go to plan: his capsule is soon blown up by a rocket launcher, wielded by the first of many outlandish figures, these wrapped in heavy bandages and seemingly tasked with the clean-up of treelike creatures whose existence and purpose in this world is only explained an hour later. His head located by the trio of Molemen, black-clad figures who act as the film's comic relief and companions for much of the film, so he is given a new body, and his adventures in the underworld begin, in which he will take on many forms, traverse several layers of the underworld, from seemingly endless concrete to settlements among the film's ever-present debris, to colossal bridges and seemingly endless voids, and meets all manner of their uncanny denizens, who become friend and foe alike.

Whilst the film does occasionally wax philosophical: the Molemen are convinced Parton is a God, admonishing those who are disbelieving and exclaiming, at one point: "God is dead. We have killed him!"whilst we catch glimpses of our hero's life before volunteering to travel into the underworld. Much of the film is unconcerned by complex comment on the underworld we traverse, a series of episodic encounters with the population of this strange world, from madcap chases through corridors chased by the dangerous monsters of this post-human realm to darkly comic slapstick to some of the most beautiful, and largely wordless, sequences in stop-motion cinema; all of these are connected to the thread of a journey through a truly alien world.

The world itself is grimy-the only time we truly see sunlight is in the scenes before our hero descends-and junk seems to be strewn everywhere-there's more than a little of the influence of films like Alien and Solaris in the otherworldly locations our hero soon must traverse; labyrinthine corridor, often in a state of disrepair, and some of which hide dangerous, strange, or downright disturbing creatures figure heavily in the film's visual imagery. The film does not flinch from showing how dangerous and strange its invented ecosystem is, especially in the case of the Baconesque grotesques that hunt through the corridors. Elsewhere, cluttered dwellings dominate the film's largest location,populated by its fleshy, and almost human-looking population of engineers, in which our hero becomes football, delivery man, as he is granted a second body, and eventually, explorer.

Takehide Hori and some of the "cast" of Junk Head on set.

Yet it is the characters that populate this world of subterranean detritus that truly make the film, from the bickering trio of Molemen who eventually become Parton's companions, to the positively Lynchian figure, suspended from the ceiling, who harvests fleshy mushroom fruit from unpleasantly pulsing walls, to the equally grotesque presence of the Doctor who puts the protagonist back together after his Icarine fall from the heavens. This is not to mention the people our traveller encounters along his journey, from the keeper of a flame who our hero takes pity on and fashions a chair for, to a mysterious red coated figure who our cyborg protagonist takes pity on. All of these characters are superbly realised, from grotesques to surprisingly endearingly odd critters.

Junk Head, thus, is much more than just an ambitious personal project, although the fact that Hori almost single-handedly did much of the film's production makes it both all the more remarkable. With a second part, Junk World, due out later this year, what Junk Head is is an inspired odyssey into the alien world of Hori's imagination, populated with wonderfully created characters, giving the true sense of cinematic vision that perhaps only stop-motion can bring us.

Rating: Must See: Personal Recommendation

Junk Head is available on BluRay from Anime Limited. It is available for streaming via Apple TV in the US only.

More information about Junk World and Junk Head, including tickets to see Junk World, can be found here, on the film's official website (Japanese): https://junkworld-movie.com/

Next week, another descent into unsettling subterranean realms with the legendary Phil Tippett in his long-gestating, finally released passion project, Mad God.