Sieben Jahre hat Takahide Hori an diesem Animationsfilm gearbeitet – als Regisseur, Autor, Skulpturenbauer, Animator und Komponist. Daraus ist eine Mischung aus Wallace & Gromit mit ein paar Star Wars-Anleihen und einem guten Schuss Science Fiction geworden. Die Animation spielt in einer dystopischen Zukunft, wo die Erdoberfläche unbewohnbar geworden ist und die Menschheit ihre Fortpflanzungsfähigkeit verloren hat. Ein einsamer Cyborg wird in die Unterwelt geschickt, um das Geheimnis aufzudecken, wie man die Fortpflanzungsfähigkeit wieder zurückgewinnen kann. Dabei begegnet er schrecklichen Monster und loyalen Verbündeten. JUNK HEAD ist ein visionäres Meisterwerk und kombiniert düstere Themen, irre Designs, aber auch Witz und Humor. Die Sprache ist ein Kauderwelsch aus Englisch und Japanisch, was dem Film noch eine weitere besondere Note verleiht. Doch keine Sorge - zum Verständnis gibt es natürlich Untertitel.

Takahide Hori has been working on this film for seven years: as director, author, propmaker, animator and composer. The outcome is a reminder of Wallace and Gromit with allusions to Star Wars and a good portion of science fiction. The animation is set in a dystopian future, in which the earth has become uninhabitable and humans have lost their ability to reproduce. Thus, a single cyborg is sent down below the surface in order to find out about how fertility can be regained and encounters horrible monsters and loyal allies. Junk head is a visionary masterpiece and combines gloomy issues with crazy design and fun. The film has subtitles, for the language is a hotchpotch of English and Japanese, which lends the film another special note.

For “Junk Head,” there’s no one but the creator. An amazing one-man show, this is basically the life’s work of Takahide Hori, whose name is in the credits literally dozens of times, doing almost every job on set and voicing most of the characters in his stop-motion vision. Insanely ambitious, “Junk Head” is a stop-motion project that weaves steampunk and sci-fi influences like “Metropolis,” H.R. Giger, “Brazil,” and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “The City of Lost Children” into a striking, surreal vision. [...] “Junk Head” takes place centuries into the future, but it looks down instead of looking to the stars, presenting a deep subterranean world where the clones that man created have formed their own society, and creatures (many of which Giger himself would have loved) have sprouted up around them. Much of “Junk Head” is like watching an artist improvise with creature and character design, finding new worm-like monsters or humanoid robots to play with in his studio. It is such a consistently imaginative piece and not just in terms of character design but framing, editing, and the other elements needed to make a stop-motion feature work.