Stop-motion sci-fi odyssey Junk Head is a masterpiece over 7 years in the making

polygon.com:

I’ve been waiting to watch Junk Head for over a decade.

That may sound like an exaggeration, but I’m being serious: Takahide Hori, the director and lead animator, first teased the dark stop-motion sci-fi horror film all the way back in 2013 when he released the first 30 minutes of the movie online as a stand-alone short. Despite being completed in 2017 and receiving rave reviews on the festival circuits, the feature-length version of Junk Head wasn’t released in Japanese theaters until 2021 — with virtually no word on an American release afterward.

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that Junk Head was available to rent on Amazon, without any sort of fanfare or announcement. I’m happy to report back that Junk Head was worth the wait, and that it would make for an excellent double feature with another similar stop-motion passion project: Phil Tippett’s Mad God.

Junk Head takes place in a distant future where humanity has devised a means of indefinitely extending their lifespans at the cost of losing the ability to reproduce. When a mysterious virus wipes out much of the remaining human population, a cyborg explorer volunteers to study the unique reproductive system of the Marigans — artificial humans created centuries ago who live in the bowels of the planet — as part of a last-ditch effort to save humanity. Unfortunately, the cyborg’s craft is damaged mid-descent, injuring the pilot and destroying their body — save for their head. With no memory of their prior life, the cyborg must navigate the wondrous and terrifying underworld in search of not only their own identity, but an answer to the question of humanity’s imminent future.

Produced over the course of seven years by Hori, a self-taught filmmaker and