Junk Head

Junk Head is an extraordinary achievement of stop-motion animation. Its influences range from art cinema to B-grade horror films and post-apocalyptic video games, but there's nothing quite like it out there. Created almost entirely by one man, Takahide Hori, Junk Head is a journey through a nightmarish underground landscape of ruins, caverns, and decaying industrial infrastructure inhabited by grotesque sentient humanoids and even more twisted and repulsive predators who lurk in the dark.

The story is fairly simple, involving the extremely perilous adventures of a future "human" who volunteers for a dangerous mission into the unknown, His travels deep underneath the Earth's surface reveal a ... phantasmagoric, meticulously detailed underworld with its own social structure, belief system, and far more deadly threats than anyone could desire. Life is cheap in this underground labyrinth and the film doesn't shy away from the many interesting ways in which living creatures can meet their end. Adding to this sense of utter alienation from anything resembling our own reality, the characters all speak in various invented languages made of harsh, guttural sounds. You are relentlessly assaulted with the fact that this world, even though it's still called Earth, might as well be as alien as any planet from science fiction.

Thankfully, Junk Head offers much more than a hellscape of misery and terror. Takahide Hori has a wonderfully playful sense of humor, sometimes dark, often quite silly, and frequently rather subtle. He also clearly cares about the many oddly shaped misfits who star in the film. They're all given personalities, motivations, and often some real dignity. They're just trying to do their best in an environment that's pretty much out to kill them at every turn. The film is never sentimental, but it invests the struggles and actions of the characters with genuine weight and significance. This movie is not just mere spectacle for its own sake.

While Junk Heap is by no means the kind of film most people on this site would expect, I hope it gains a new audience of fans from the MAL community. The film is audacious in the scope of its execution and offers the kind of pleasures that popular entertainment rarely does. Hopefully Junk Heap will encourage some anime fans to delve into other forms of animation storytelling more deeply (I would especially recommend Jan Svankmajer). And if nothing else, maybe you'll have some intriguingly unique dreams in days to come.