Phil Tippett Finally Creates a (Horrifying) Vision All His Own with Mad God
They’ve done studies on why a baby’s crying immediately fills us with panic. It’s a sound refined through eons of human development to be as alarming as possible, incapable of being ignored or tuned out. In Mad God, the nigh-indescribable film resulting from 30 years of labor from stop-motion master Phil Tippett, there is a stretch where the only sound is the squalling of a misshapen infantile creature, swaddled in rags and covered in gore, as it is carried to an inevitable doom by a silent and uncaring phantom clad in a plague doctor’s crow-proboscis mask. The sequence seems to last forever, and it’s because of the screaming. This interminable moment of suffering is somehow even more upsetting than nearly all of the gory, fetid, sadistic tableau in the hour prior to it.
If you are at all a fan or admirer of animation—that illusory medium that’s so often restricted to telling children’s stories—it’s essential viewing.
Speaking about his medium in an interview, Tippett paraphrased Roger Ebert when asked what it is about stop-motion animation that so fascinates: “Computer graphics look real but feel fake, and stop motion looks fake but feels real.” He said director Joe Johnston, with whom he worked on the special effects for The Empire Strikes Back, called it “an unholy art.”
Stop-motion isn’t just the medium Tippett has worked in since the 1970s. It really is his medium, notwithstanding the incredible work that other artists like those at LAIKA Studios have done. He is responsible for the hulking walkers and a bunch of the creatures in Star Wars; the entire first act of The Empire Strikes Back is filled with his expertise. Every blackly comedic beat revolving around the walking, talking human rights violation that is ED-209 in the RoboCop series was crafted by him. He brought the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to life, and the bugs of Starship Troopers.
I write often write about animation and about how it is maybe the truest movie magic. Tippett’s animation is almost always done in service of other directors’ visions. The guy’s only other feature-length credit as director is the made-for-TV Starship Troopers 2, a sequel to someone else’s work. Mad God represents the first time Tippett, one of the most respected living artists in his medium, has been given a completely blank slate and all the time he needs to do whatever completely original idea springs forth from his mind. It’s a dark and gory miracle that it exists at all: Tippett had the idea in 1990, shelved it, and then resurrected it through crowdfunding in 2010.
There’s little in the way of plot in Mad God, no dialogue, and no explicit motivation for anything happening. The only meaning you get out of it is what you interpret for yourself, meaning that a lot of viewers will inevitably hate it or find themselves confused. Even if you love it, it’s liable to be a tough watch, especially for those with sensory issues.
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