Junk World

Takahide Hori's 2025 Japanese animation is set a thousand years before an earlier film of his. A robot named Robin is charged with escorting a human commander to a city underground. The film was made in puppet animation with sets built by hand. The underground world is made of pipelines, heaps of waste and narrow passages; the design is its real draw and every frame is dense with detail. Hori produced his previous film almost single-handedly and takes on most of the work here too. The dialogue is in an invented language; the narrative explains nothing and builds its world through the image. Who it's for: those who like stop motion animation and dark science fiction. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a legible narrative; the film never explains its rules.