Film
Phil Tippett is a MAD GOD
The NSFW Passion Project of a Stop-Motion Artist Who Never Gave Up on His Art is the Perfect Reflection of Today’s Bizarro Alternate Timeline
“The final form of Mad God isn’t the film itself, but the memory after you watch it. It’s bringing you to that moment just after waking up from a dream, frozen, exploring fragments of your feral mind before they fade back into the shadows. That’s the moment. Mad God is just a way to get you there. “ — Phil Tippett in Fangoria
2021 is the year that stop-motion animation evolves once more with the debut of Phil Tippett’s Mad God (Tippett Studio). The phantasmagoric passion project of the genius who is responsible for how much we love and cling to the “old-school” methods of films like Star Wars, Starship Troopers, and Robocop finally brings his opus to the screen in a jaw-droppingly freakish feature film.
Mad God is a fully practical stop-motion film that is unlike any you’ve seen before and yet will feel completely familiar to a certain generation of audiences. As I was watching it, I found myself thinking, “What did I just watch?” along with “How did they DO that?” and when I was done, I had to go watch every YouTube video about its making that I could find, longing for a documentary about the film.
It’s not that the film doesn’t stand alone. It does, in infinite detail. Set in a steampunk-esque post-apocalyptic nightmare, the story (or non-narrative, as Phil Tippett refers to it) follows an assassin from a long line of assassins sent to destroy the world, or save it, depending on your viewpoint. The film opens with a long shot of a space-pod-like diving bell descending into a hellscape of dystopian madness that is far too entertaining for me to describe here without giving away the surprises; you’re going to have to watch it yourself.
That is if you think you’re up for a film steeped in imagery that is dark, sticky, monstrous, horrifying, and yet somehow recognizable at 24 frames per second.
The History of MAD GOD
The project began in 1987. Phil Tippett at this point was a huge artist in the stop motion animation scene. Tippett got his start in animation when first inspired as a child watching the 1955 airing of King Kong (1933). He says in the 2019 documentary, Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters, “I got amazed by the concept that there was another world before our world where monsters without men lived.” He got his start in his garage, cooking up small stop-motion films of dinosaurs and other monsters. “No one was interested in what I was interested in.”
Prior to this point, stop-motion animation was a common feature of genre films in the 1920s-1950s. Its history is inexorably tied to the creature feature. One of the early pioneers was Willis O’Brien, who worked on Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933). O’Brien went on to mentor another great, Ray Harryhausen, whose filmography includes most of the popular genre films of the time from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) to Clash of the Titans (1981).
By the 1970s, stop motion was a well-known technique, which explains why there is a huge amount of nostalgia built around the style. I remember watching old reruns of The Gumby Show (1955) and the iconic California Raisins commercials. But probably the most iconic stop-motion comes from Star Wars, which was one of Phil Tippett’s early films. Tippett was working alongside Bill Stromberg at Cascade Studios, which made stop-motion commercials (including the Pillsbury Doughboy). George Lucas actually set up Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) as a way of being able to incorporate stop-motion animation into Star Wars, because there were no unions for them at the time, and unions were a huge part of Hollywood filmmaking (Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters).
You can see Phil Tippett’s (literal) touch in the cantina scenes, where Tippett helped create the iconic blue keyboard playing alien (which was acted by Tippett himself in the costume) and other costumes, as well as the AT-AT walkers, the classic chess scene in the Millenium Falcon (which Tippett helped recreate in the new films), the monster in the trash compactor, the taun-tauns, and various other monsters in the original Star Wars films such as the Rancor (one of the most beloved movie monsters of all time) and Jabba the Hutt. Tippett was the primary designer for the puppet for Jabba the Hutt, which once conceived, managed to fit three people inside of it.
It is this iconic hand-craftsmanship that Star Wars fans still obsess over today. It’s also seen as one of the major reasons that the prequels failed so spectacularly. As Jordan Maison puts it in the fantastic article “Why People Can’t Enjoy the VFX in The Star Wars Prequels”, “The biggest issue with the clone troopers came from the Uncanny Valley effect. If you’re not familiar with the term it’s a theory that holds when something looks and moves almost, but not exactly, like humans do it causes viewers to be repulsed. Basically, you know something is off, even if you can’t pinpoint it, and it throws the entire scene out of whack for you. Instead of investing you in what’s happening, it’s causing a sense of revulsion.”
Stop motion creations are a kind of golem, requiring delicate work to create as they must be first built on a skeleton and then sculpted with clay. And the act of filming them is like sculping too. Capturing stop motion relies heavily on the animator’s natural understanding of movement and organic beauty. What results is often a more believable animation, which explains why audiences are still captivated by the art form today.
How Many Adjectives Can I Use to Describe This Movie?
Mad God began as a way for Tippett to do his own work outside of the studios in the 80s. It seems that part of what stalled the project for so long was his emotional reaction to the advent of computer animation and the fear that stop-motion was a dying art.
There’s a sense that Tippett is the kind of artist who’s happier working behind the scenes. “Once one puts on a mask or changes your physicality, you can become something else that you’re not. You can inhabit what that character is,” he says of his work on Star Wars in costuming in Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters.
Audiences are familiar with the digital-organic divide in filmmaking. Despite the fact that we can recognize that digital animation is in fact, just as intensive of an art form as something like stop-motion, and in all honesty, a technique that doesn’t have the limitations of the latter, we still appreciate and miss these organic techniques, imbuing them with a kind of nostalgia that makes me wonder if today’s generations of viewers will understand the significance of this history.
Mad God proves that the future for stop-motion animation is not dead. It is alive and thriving, and perhaps more than a little bit pissed off. Over the next thirty years, Phil Tippett would work on Mad God in pieces, sketching out ideas in notebooks, storyboarding scenes, and crafting prop upon prop in his studio like a slightly unhinged but loveable hoarder.
The project found new life when a group of animators found boxes of props and puppets from the original footage and helped Tippett complete his vision. The fact that over 60 people spent most of their free time and weekends volunteering to help bring the project to fruition proves how although Tippett may not have seen it as viable, the people around him did.
In 2012, Tippett Studios launched a Kickstarter to fund the film that was quickly funded and grew to $125,000. This allowed the release of the film in three parts in 2014, 2015, and 2018. The 2021 feature includes these three films plus thirty minutes of additional footage, combining them into a film that somehow manages to work despite being a Frankenstein’s monster, which feels fitting.
Audiences will not be prepared for this kaleidoscopic experience, even those who, like myself, grew up loving stop-motion animation in the form of The Nightmare Before Christmas, or are hardcore fans of the genre. We are simply not used to seeing a full-length feature film that is stop motion treated like this, let alone one that is unflinchingly NSFW and aesthetically obsessed with perfection.
There have been amazing stop-motion films before but rarely do filmmakers apply the kind of camera styles like the zooms, moving cameras, long-shots, and intense focus that Tippett uses. The movements are recognizable and deeply realistic, almost hyperrealistic. The music, scored by Richard Beggs (Apocalypse Now, Harry Potter, Ghostbusters) is haunting and at times charming. And, the film utilizes animation and live-action, weaving together all of the schools of filmmaking in a way that is relatively unheard of in today’s cinema.
It’s worth noting that the film is extremely dark and deeply disturbed. I’m talking “female mannequins masturbating on screen” and “vomit guzzling gore” and “surgeons rooting in bodies for tentacle monsters” kind of disturbing. But I don’t think this makes the film one that can’t be enjoyed and appreciated.
After watching a million behind the scenes on YouTube, I was sort of enchanted by how Tippett has done so much with his career but sweetly, buys a lot of his models at Ace Hardware. I think I missed the uncanny valley naked masturbating doll aisle on my last trip to get paint. But somehow, I don’t feel weirded out by this. It makes sense to me that 2021 would be the year this kind of film gets to debut.
As Tippett’s wife (who has run Tippett Studios from the beginning and is the “business side” of the venture) lovingly puts it from her role as the keeper of the mad god, “Mad God is a very unique kind of experiment.”
Mad God is a lush, exhausting, entrancing deep-dive that requires either full commitment to geekery or some hardcore drugs to witness. It’s a sequence of dreams tied up in a nightmare. It’s abstract, weird, obsessive, absurd, eccentric, visionary, and dark. It’s Fraggle Rock meets Doom meets Beetlejuice meets Bioshock meets WWII historicals meets M. Night Shyamalan's The Village meets Spirited Away meets The Matrix.
Mad God is a new cult classic.
This film is reviewed as part of Interstellar Flight Press’ coverage of the Alamo Drafthouse Fantastic Fest 2021. We thank Alamo Drafthouse for providing a free screening of this film.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
