Take­hide Hori: ​‘Every­thing start­ed from my misunderstanding’

Made over the course of 7 years, adapt­ing Take­hide Hori’s short film of the same name, Junk Head is a grimy, Švankma­jer-esque spelunk­ing into an absurd world where fussy mid­dle man­agers and bored shift work­ers coex­ist with mon­strous fleshy spi­der-crea­tures and oth­er demon­ic enti­ties. See­ing the grotesque, imag­i­na­tive crea­ture design and the scale of it you might not guess that, before the short film that was expand­ed into the fea­ture, direc­tor Hori had nev­er worked in ani­ma­tion before, or filmmaking.

Not only that, he han­dled near­ly every aspect of pro­duc­tion him­self: build­ing the sets, design­ing and build­ing the pup­pets, com­pos­ing the score, voic­ing the gut­tur­al oth­er­world­ly grunts of its fun­ny lit­tle char­ac­ters as well as ani­mat­ing them. After play­ing fes­ti­vals inter­na­tion­al­ly includ­ing Fan­ta­sia, Junk Head earned praise from Guiller­mo del Toro, call­ing it a ​“one-man band work of deranged bril­liance”. We spoke to Mori about his DIY approach, work­ing on a bud­get and how theme park inte­ri­or dec­o­rat­ing trans­lates to filmmaking.

LWLies: What’s it like man­ag­ing an ani­ma­tion pro­duc­tion pipeline, where you’re work­ing on near­ly every aspect of it?

Hori: Basi­cal­ly, I had no idea about ani­ma­tion or film­mak­ing, I had no expe­ri­ence what­so­ev­er. But basi­cal­ly what hap­pened was, you know when you were a child on the cor­ner of your text­book, you draw a lit­tle car­toon and then you just flip the pages, you can move the car­toon? So I thought, ​“Okay, ani­ma­tion is kind of like that.” So I thought, ​“Well, it should be fair­ly easy, or that’s some­thing that I could do if I want­ed to.” That was my start­ing point.

Were there any skills that you had to learn while you were in the process of mak­ing Junk Head, or did you go in ready?

It was pret­ty much all on the job. I was cre­at­ing art, I was an artist before­hand, I was doing arts like draw­ings, paint­ings, and also cre­at­ing dolls. So I was used to cre­at­ing 3D dolls, but I nev­er moved them. Or again, film­mak­ing, that was some­thing I’d nev­er done before. So, I learned as I went along. So when some­thing was nec­es­sary, I looked up on the inter­net, or I read a book and I had to study on the spot.

I read that you have a back­ground in theme park inte­ri­or dec­o­ra­tion, how did that influ­ence your approach to the film?

It influ­enced pret­ty much every­thing. If there’s some­thing like, say, Dis­ney­land, when you want to have a kind of aging effect, you have to treat the sur­faces. So that skill, I was able to adapt pret­ty much every­thing to that ¹⁄₆ scale for my cre­ation. I always want­ed to become an artist, and I was doing draw­ings, paint­ings, and was cre­at­ing dolls. So, when I was 40 years old, I decid­ed I want to make a movie, and I used every­thing that I had learned until that point to make it. So, not just the actu­al artis­tic cre­ative skills, but also man­ag­ing people.

How did you go about build­ing the sets?

So, in Junk Head, pret­ty much every­thing hap­pens in the sub­ter­ranean world, loads of cor­ri­dors and path­ways. I had to be as eco­nom­i­cal and effec­tive as I could be. So, with a cor­ri­dor, you can actu­al­ly reuse the same cor­ri­dor over and over again, walls or ceil­ings too.

So I want­ed to make it big­ger, obvi­ous­ly, in terms of scale, but what I did was I thought about the time­frame and the bud­get, then cal­cu­lat­ed the scale of the actu­al set, this is what I could do with­in that par­tic­u­lar bud­get and the time­frame. So that’s why some of the dolls don’t have eyes, for exam­ple.
The set that I prob­a­bly worked the hard­est on was about halfway through the film, the set of the Valve Vil­lage, the one look­ing like a fac­to­ry. I want­ed to cre­ate some­thing real­ly elab­o­rate, so it took me six months to actu­al­ly cre­ate that set of that vil­lage. I think it’s my favourite, I worked real­ly hard on that.

You’ve men­tioned doing draw­ings and paint­ings before, so that made me won­der, what drew you to stop-motion ani­ma­tion as a medi­um to work with?

It was all my mis­un­der­stand­ing, because stop-motion looked real­ly easy, I thought. So every­thing start­ed from my misunderstanding.

…and I imag­ine you learned it wasn’t so easy!

[Laughs] Yes, but then again, please under­stand my point of view. I’m not real­ly great at com­put­ers or graph­ics, and you have to learn about soft­ware, you have to learn about com­put­ers. I thought my brain doesn’t have that kind of capac­i­ty. But where­as the stop-motion ani­ma­tion, all you have to do is that you cre­ate it all, you move it, take a shot, easy. How wrong was I?

Were there any key films you had in mind when you set out to make Junk Head?

I took influ­ence from all the movies I’d seen, I must say, but I love sci-fi movies. So when I made this Junk Head, I think my biggest influ­ence would be Alien. And also I think Hell­rais­er is British, right? I was very inspired by that film.

Yeah, Clive Barker’s from round here! Were there any stop-motion stu­dios you were look­ing at while you were learn­ing how to make the film, per­haps as a sort of guide on what you want­ed to do and what you didn’t want to do?

It might not sound quite right if I said this, but I wasn’t inter­est­ed in stop-motion films at all before, until I start­ed mak­ing Junk Head! But what I was think­ing is I want to cre­ate some­thing that’s close, as close as pos­si­ble to a live action movie. So what I was look­ing at was Juras­sic Park, the spe­cial effects in some­thing like that was what I had in mind.

It’s fun­ny that you say that, because it did remind me a lot of the work of Phil Tip­pett, who worked on Juras­sic Park. Feels all con­nect­ed in this fun­ny way.

I actu­al­ly spoke to Phil Tip­pett recent­ly, and so his new film, Mad God, was released in Japan quite recent­ly, actu­al­ly. And yes, I do see the sim­i­lar­i­ty with his style, in terms of cre­ativ­i­ty or visu­als, yes. So it’s quite inter­est­ing that you men­tioned him. Phil told me that he saw Junk Head, and he said that we might have born from the same egg, and I feel so close to you cre­ative­ly. I was so glad to hear that.

That sort of brings me back to the pup­pets, they have some won­der­ful­ly creepy designs. Were there any you were par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of?

I like the main char­ac­ter, because his body changes so many times, and I think that’s quite unique in any ani­ma­tion, the meta­mor­pho­sis of the main char­ac­ter. He has the same per­son­al traits all the way through, even though he changes his shapes, and obvi­ous­ly I want­ed the audi­ence to feel that he’s the same per­son. So I think, from a cre­ative per­spec­tive, I think the main char­ac­ter is my favourite to work on.

You were across a lot of this, but you were work­ing with a very small crew as well, and I was won­der­ing how you got in touch with peo­ple, and got them to be part of the movie?

So, I cre­at­ed that first 30-minute short film, com­plete­ly on my own. But as I went along, I was writ­ing the process on my blog, and also I was tweet­ing every­thing.. So, when I moved onto this fea­ture ver­sion, I didn’t have any bud­get to adver­tise to hire peo­ple. So I did it on Twit­ter. But unfor­tu­nate­ly, I had this bud­get for the fea­ture film ver­sion, but that’s for the pro­duc­tion. So I made it clear that, all right, we can’t pay you much, but every­body worked so hard and did great jobs. And so that’s why I’m doing most of the voic­es myself, that’s pure­ly for the budget!

You’ve told me about some skills you’ve brought into the film like mak­ing the dolls, set dec­o­rat­ing and mak­ing comics. Did you have any expe­ri­ence in mak­ing music before?

[Laughs] Sor­ry, I shouldn’t… Sor­ry, God, but it’s so fun­ny. I don’t real­ly lis­ten to music. Music isn’t my hob­by, I had nev­er made a sin­gle note at all before, but the music soft­ware, they are rel­a­tive­ly easy to use. So I thought, ​“Well, okay, I could make a lit­tle bit of effort and prob­a­bly I could do it.” So, it was ran­dom, I did it ran­dom­ly, and I’m so glad that it worked.

You said you’re work­ing on sequels – is there any­thing you’re going to try to do some­thing dif­fer­ent­ly dur­ing production?

So for this one, all the dolls were made by hand, from clay and oth­er mate­ri­als, every sin­gle one. But now since 3D print­ers are so much cheap­er, I start­ed using one for Junk Head 2. So I think that’s the biggest change, so with all the char­ac­ters, I’m going to use my com­put­er to mod­el it, and just use 3D print­er to cre­ate the actu­al dolls, so I think that’s the major change. [At this point Mori pulls out an unpaint­ed pup­pet] And this doll, I made with my com­put­er and a 3D printer.

But again for Junk Head 2, I have to study as I go along, but I also want to use more graph­ics, com­put­er graph­ics, I want to use that to make it big­ger in scale. Even going dig­i­tal you can use ana­log tech­niques with­in this world, and there’s so much poten­tial there. As I told you, I love sci-fi movies. And as a genre, peo­ple asso­ciate sci-fi with Hol­ly­wood, with big bud­gets. And com­pared to these great Hol­ly­wood films, my bud­get is tiny, tiny, tiny. But I don’t think you need a big bud­get to cre­ate some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing exciting.

Junk Head releas­es in UK cin­e­mas on 24 April 2023.