Junk World Revives A Cult Stop-Motion Sci-Fi Series With More Polish But No Less Madness

By Reuben Baron | September 16, 2025 | 2:15pm

Anime Reviews junk world

Junk World Revives A Cult Stop-Motion Sci-Fi Series With More Polish But No Less Madness

Every year before the official announcement of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness line-up, programmer Peter Kuplowsky posts a series of film posters as hints for the upcoming slate. For Junk World, the hint was Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. The obvious connection is these are both sci-fi prequels, with Junk World taking place 1,042 years before Takehide Hori’s 2017 feature Junk Head. In my head, there’s another connection between Junk World and Phantom Menace: both raise the question of whether the things that make a movie look better can also make it worse.

To be clear, Junk World hasn’t digitized the world of Junk Head to anywhere near the same degree as Phantom Menace did Star Wars. As behind-the-scenes footage over the credits proudly demonstrates, both of Hori’s “Junk” movies are lovingly hand-crafted works of stop-motion animation, with CG effects used only as necessary. However, like the Star Wars prequels versus the original trilogy, Junk World’s past is much shinier compared to Junk Head’s grittier future.

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One big difference is in how the stop-motion puppets are constructed—instead of clay figures like the original, the prequel uses 3D-printed characters. The change in aesthetic fits the different setting, where humanity hasn’t devolved as much as it will, and the complexity of the action is stunning. Yet I find myself preferring the rougher look of Junk Head and how much more visibly you could see the effort of hands manipulating its physical reality. The new film still looks cool—and how could I not admire this was all brought to life by a team of just six animators (double Junk Head’s team of three)? It’s just a different kind of cool, closer in some senses to the puppets-and-CGI combo style of Thunderbolt Fantasy.

Those coming into Junk World without having seen Junk Head—potentially a sizable portion of the audience, given Junk Head barely got a release beyond the festival circuit—don’t need to worry about missing any background info from the first film. That said, this does not mean viewers, whether newcomers or old fans, will have an easy time keeping up with the labyrinthine plot. Though Junk World explains more of its universe’s mysteries than Junk Head did, those explanations come so rapidly that clear understanding is beside the point. The opening narration bombards the viewer with exposition about the war between humans and their genetically engineered underground workforce known as Mulligans, introducing human and Mulligan characters working together to investigate a spacetime anomaly. Passing through the anomaly creates paradoxes, with each chapter of the film following a different character as they try to navigate near-Tenet levels of timeline convolution.

Akin to Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal or Phil Tippett’s Mad God, the main appeal of Hori’s Junk series isn’t its plot but the amazement of its imagination and craft. Junk World constantly delivers strange, disturbing, twistedly funny sights you’ve never seen before: a Mulligan terrorist in shibari gear powering up into a blob with multiple faces, a broken robot playing god by manipulating the social evolution of cat-like creatures, a sequence of soldiers eating phallic “mashrooms” as badly-aligned censorship graphics deliberately fail to obscure what we’re watching. The film is packed with H.R. Giger-esque monsters and weird little guys scuttling around the edges of the frame. Even if you lose track of what’s happening, you can’t get bored watching it. One mild disappointment is that the dialogue this time around is mostly in normal Japanese rather than the made-up “Gonyogonyo-go” language that lent the first film a more alien edge, though Hori and his fellow animator Atsuko Miyake impress with a wide variety of voices they perform themselves.

At the Midnight Madness premiere, Hori introduced Junk World by saying, “You will enjoy this perverted film because you are perverts.” Guilty as charged (though I have to worry a little bit for the young child in the audience whose parents somehow thought it was a good idea to bring them to a midnight movie with a bunch of content warnings). I wouldn’t call Junk World a great movie in any respect beyond the miracle of its existence (and that miracle feels slightly less exciting next to its even more miraculous predecessor), but I had a great time watching it. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching a bunch of crazy artists smash their Star Wars action figures together while making weird sex jokes—and really, what more do you need for a fun midnight movie experience? I’m looking forward to enjoying the series’ grand finale, Junk End, in another seven years or however long it takes to make.

Reuben Baron is the author of the webcomic Con Job: Revenge of the SamurAlchemist, a member of the neurodiverse theatre troupe EPIC Players, and a contributor to Looper and Anime News Network, among other websites. You can follow him on Bluesky at @rubigb.bsky.social.