Director Takehide Hori is an auteur in every sense of the word – his singular, obsessive vision saw him single-handedly produce the thirty-minute stop-motion short JUNK HEAD 1 back in 2013. So rapturously received was his debut work that he spent seven years expanding it to feature-length format, with the full JUNK HEAD movie seeing international release in its final form in 2021. Before this, Hori had no filmmaking experience whatsoever, and taught himself how to make poseable models, miniature sets, and to use the camera equipment necessary to realise his twisted dreams.

JUNK HEAD is one of the strangest movies I've ever seen, and it remains fairly obscure. It doesn't even have a review here on ANN! (I did recently review it on my own blog here.) For US readers intrigued enough to see the film Jonathan Clements describes as “like The Clangers, but with more stabbing,” it's currently available to stream for free on both Kanopy and Hoopla. UK residents will need to make do with Anime Limited's Blu-ray or various paid-for streaming options.

To enjoy JUNK WORLD, it's absolutely not essential to watch JUNK HEAD first, but doing so does make some callbacks and references make more sense. In this world, 280 years previously, humanity made a biological, cloned slave race, the “Mulligans,” who are entirely male and have no reproductive functions. At some point, the Mulligans perfect their own cloning technology and, with greater numbers, wage war against their creators, a conflict that lasts 150 years. JUNK WORLD opens following the war's end, at a tentative peace summit attended by leaders from both sides.

Due to Hori's eccentric choice of medium and aesthetics, both human and Mulligan characters aren't exactly what one might charitably call “attractive”. They are remarkably weird, almost cute in a deformed kind of way. His skill with stop-motion animation has progressed in leaps and bounds, even if his first film remains a remarkable achievement. Here, he seemingly effortlessly animates large crowds of characters all moving at once, including some spectacular action scenes. The thought of how much time this must have taken brings me out in a cold sweat.

Characters range from large, muscular military types to creative androids and mech suits to deformed monstrosities with too many teeth and sharp appendages. The Mulligans are bizarre creations, bred without eyes by their cruel masters. They get around this limitation by implanting photoreceptive worms directly into their brains. It's queasily gross, which also applies to all manner of wriggly, squirmy, dangerous creatures that Hide likes to squick out his audiences with.

The main antagonists this time around are the Gyurans, a hilariously nutty religious Mulligan supremacist paramilitary group who fly around in a rocket-propelled church, led by a bondage-rope and black mitre-wearing bishop who looks like Ghost's Papa Emeritus by way of Warhammer 40K's Imperial Ecclesiarchy. The rank and file members wear tight thongs as part of their fetishistic uniform, and the camera never shies away from prominently framing their comically bare ass cheeks. Unlike JUNK HEAD, where there is no intelligible dialogue (any spoken language is merely gibberish), JUNK WORLD is full of spoken Japanese, from human, Mulligan, and android characters alike.

Robotic character Robin is the closest thing to a traditional protagonist, but each of the other main characters also gets some time in the spotlight, from the honorable, stoic Mulligan leader Dante, the severe yet reasonable female human leader Lady Torys, and the humorous, if annoying, human double-act of the Ambassador and his obsequious underling. The film employs a bonkers time loop/parallel world plot structure centered around the mysterious bubble-shaped anomaly in the city of Kaapvaal. This leads, in the first instance, to some extremely clever explanations for previous odd plot details, and later to increasingly bizarre alternative timelines caused by individual character choices. The multi-act structure is marked by increasing nuttiness with each successive act, which often led to loud, bemused laughter from the festival audience. If you think you know where the plot of JUNK WORLD is heading at any point, the likelihood is you'll be completely wrong. It's one of the most gleefully unpredictable, unhinged films ever made, even more so than its predecessor.

The set design this time is more varied than JUNK HEAD's predominantly gray, dark corridors. Set mostly on the surface, we see this world's sky for the first time. The military base, suspended by taut wires across a deep chasm, looks like one of Shield's helicarriers, and the aerial fight scenes between multiple flying vehicles look remarkable, with awesome pyrotechnics. Kaapvaal is an unsettling place, the streets filled with multicolored, disturbingly putrid organic growths, and stalked by toothily aggressive biological aberrations.

By far the most entertaining part of the movie is Robin's time travel adventure, where he becomes the “god” of a race of primitive beings. His plan to accelerate their societal development is hilariously horrifying yet oddly realistic, and the cute Princess Bastet is a really fun character. Her story arc is among the most affecting parts of this certifiably bonkers stop-motion work of cinematic madness.

For those who enjoy the funnier side of body horror, there's a particularly gross scene where an obviously male genital-shaped edible “mashroom” is thoroughly… enjoyed… by a certain character. I watched this scene in horrified, hilarious disbelief. It probably needs to be seen to be believed, and is greatly enhanced by the use of comically ineffectual pixellation. There's a general theme of genital shaped objects erupting from unexpected places throughout both of Hori's films, including, on this occasion, some dangerous penis-flowers with a nasty sting. It's probably not a world I'd personally like to visit, but it's certainly very entertaining to watch.

Although JUNK WORLD is definitely very enjoyable to watch without prior knowledge of JUNK HEAD, there are plenty of little nods to the previous film, including an essential post-credit scene, well worth waiting for, that ties events very directly, in satisfying fashion. The credits also include some fascinating behind-the-scenes details that show just how incredible Hori and his team's work was on this film. There's apparently a further movie planned, to complete Hori's “Junk” trilogy, and I, for one, cannot wait to return to his incredibly individual, disturbingly chaotic, and uproariously funny world.