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.

"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.

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.

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.

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!