About the film
- Directed by
- Takahide Hori
- Released
- February 18, 2022
- Certification
- 15
- Country
- Japan
- Starring
- Takahide Hori, Atsuko Miyake, Yuji Sugiyama
More credits
- Language
- Japanese
- Origin
- JP
- Studios
- Surprise Red, Yamiken
- Belongs to
- Junk Head Collection
- Written by
- Takahide Hori
- Produced by
- Kent Yoshida, Yuichi Nakao, Yoshinori Enomoto
- Cinematography
- Takahide Hori
- Music
- Takahide Hori
- Box office
- $81,755
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?
How to see Junk Head (2022)
Streaming
United States
Also available internationally
Source: JustWatch
Physical media
More editions
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It’s an incredible film. Very much worth seeing if you like animation or independent filmmmaking.
Watch it on Tubi. Make sure to turn on the subtitles.
Is it appropriate for an almost 13 year old. He loves animation but I don’t want him to see anything too dark.
Dylan Evans I wouldn’t have a problem showing it to my kids, but they have seen similar stuff before (both with and without my knowing) – I would recommend watching it yourself first , as it might be a little bit dark for some kids
There is also a little bit of Japanese dialogue, it’s not a very talky movie (mostly silent) but there a couple of parts where they will need to read subs!
Dylan Evans there’s some gore and there’s a gag with a monster looking like it has a long penis (it turns out to be a tail) but it’s actually a cute, lighthearted silly movie with cartoonish humor and sweet characters. It has a dark surface aesthetic, but not a dark story at all 🙂
Love this movie, easily the best and smoothest stop motion fight scenes I’ve ever seen, The Three Kings fight at the end, fucking brilliant.
Makes me think of Phil Tippet’s Mad God as painstaking wild obsession that took years to make
Rebecca Gransden!
I’ve seen this and it’s an amazing short film!
Hope he gets to make the rest of it at some point. The feature length version still just sort of abruptly… ends.
J.R. Sears the prequel film just came out, junk world, and he’s working on a final one 🙂
Jonathan Wojcik OH! I had no idea, I’m so glad to hear that. I’m gonna check out the prequel
LOVE THIS FILM!!
Joe O’Connor
Oh I love this movie so much!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evil_Within_(2017_film)
On YouTube for free, and so is Junk World, which is a prequel. Great movies, Takahide Hori is making the 3rd part soon