Junk Head (2022)

At forty, an interior designer with no filmmaking training decided to make a stop-motion movie. He didn't know it was impossible, so he did it.

JUNK HEAD (2017) began as a thirty-minute short that Takahide Hori built almost entirely alone, teaching himself to sculpt the puppets from online tutorials, photographing tens of thousands of frames one at a time, scoring it, and voicing the characters. It took him four years. Then it found an audience online, and he kept going.

The finished feature is set 1600 years in the future, after gene therapy made humans nearly immortal at the cost of their ability to reproduce. Far below the surface live the marigans, artificial laborers who long ago rebelled. A human surveyor is sent down to study how they breed. He is dismembered almost immediately.

Seven years of work, most of it one man in a room. Guillermo del Toro called it "a one-man band work of deranged brilliance." Hori voiced eighteen of the characters himself, and the closing credits are mostly his name, scrolling past again and again.

What's the most obsessive labor of love you've ever fallen for?