An animated film in volume as divisive as it is delirious, “Junk Head” which is released this Wednesday, May 18, required seven years of hard work from its author demiurge Takahide Hori. A work-monster both funny and creepy, which synthesizes a century of horrifying cinematographic imagination, science-fiction and graphics.
Stop-motion animation, or stop-motion, is in itself already an insane feat since it consists of taking a photo of a fixed scene, modifying the content of said scene slightly, taking another photo, modifying the pause again, etc., until at a minimum of twelve iterations for each desired second of film. Thus, it will have taken seven years for Takahide Hori to shoot the 140,000 shots necessary for the 100 minutes that lasts. Junkhead !
A maddening technical feat
He is at the same time the director, the author, the chief operator, the decorator, the editor, the dubber, the composer… And for good reason: crazy about cinema, the former art student then earning his life as an interior decorator embarked on the adventure on his own in 2009 as a challenge to his approaching 40s! Completely self-taught when it comes to animation (thanks, books and tutorials!), he worked to bring his visions of pure cinema to life, literally, in 24fps, with no regard for their feasibility.
After four years of benedictine work (frappadingue, the benedictine!), he had thus completed a thirty-minute short film alone. Posted on YouTube, this “beta” version of Junkhead panicked the web and attracted the attention of producers and directors around the world to Takahide Hori. If Hollywood gave him a golden bridge to transform his essay into a feature film, he preferred his (total) artistic freedom: thanks to the financial support of a Japanese production company, he completed his project in his very personal way. but with reinforcement! Three years were therefore enough to produce the remaining 70 minutes… Thus ended in 2017, Junkhead toured the festivals, where it turned the brain everywhere, and ended up being released in 2020 in Japan, where it has since become the object of a cult. They’re right : Junkhead is madness!
A crazy declaration of love at the cinema
The story: in the very distant future, men no longer die but they no longer procreate either. Their clones, who meekly carried out the most tedious and dangerous tasks, were exiled to a gigantic underground world, where they mutated and proliferated… Parton is sent on a mission to unlock the forgotten secrets of procreation… His odyssey will be eventful, harrowing, gore, burlesque, disturbing, poetic, craspec, metaphysical and… (very) bizarrely hilarious.
More than its animation with such fluidity that one forgets the circumstances of its production, or its narration which, by its erratic progression, betrays the said complicated birth, it is its staging that strikes and amazes, by his zesty virtuosity, almost cartoonesque (Sam – Evid Dead – Raimi way) and by the richness of his technical vocabulary.
But that’s nothing compared to the half-cyberpunk, half-post-apocalyptic world he develops. Populated with grotesque creatures, shady humanoids, spidery creatures, toothed worms and other organic ugliness, it is a labyrinthine and syncretic hell, borrowing pell-mell from Shinya Tsukamoto, Tustomu Nihei, Hieronymus Bosch, Phil Tippett, William S. Burroughs, the Quay brothers, Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Cronenberg, HR Giger and a few other builders of fierce and chaotic hallucinations, without it being necessary, deep down, to know any of them to appreciate this universe.
We will not go into further detail so as not to deprive you of the amazement in front of this lively madness. But know, you, who enter here, that you will have to give up all hope… not to come out turned upside down!