By John Corrado
A prequel to his 2017 stop-motion film Junk Head, which was in turn based on a 2014 short, Junk World finds Japanese filmmaker Takahide Hori playing around on an even larger canvass. Hori’s film is set in a world of people and clones (called “Mulligans”), who rise up against the humans, leading to a war.
The story and world-building gets overly convoluted, and the film goes on too long at 104 minutes. But the craft behind Junk World is so undeniably impressive, it’s somewhat easy to forgive these things, if only for the film’s sheer ambition and artistic merits. The fact that this was all done by a small troupe of six animators makes it even more staggering, with them creating post-apocalyptic landscapes and surprisingly large-scale action sequences entirely by hand.
Despite being fashioned as a sci-fi epic, Hori folds in dark humour and satirical elements as well, so we’re never really sure what to expect from scene to scene; the film is at times grotesque, and also features a surprising amount of phallic imagery and BDSM overtones.
As unwieldy as the film can sometimes feel, the hand-crafted quality of Junk World draws us in, and the behind-the-scenes footage shown during the end credits gives us a deeper appreciation of the amount of work that went into what we just watched.
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