Phil Tippett’s Magnum Opus: Mad God
My jaw fell open at the start of Phil Tippett’s Mad God and stayed open for the entire duration of the film. It’s that stunning.
When writing about the movie for my “Best list” for last year, I said in my original capsule review: “This should be played on the mounted TVs inside every punk or heavy metal bar worthy of the name. People with a lot of tattoos and piercings who dress all in black are going to want to make babies to it.” I suppose I got a little carried away. But to get a sense of the exhilaration I felt from watching this, I suggest checking out the trailer before reading through this piece:
In another article written around the same time as this one about Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (1985), I mentioned that post-apocalyptic fictions and their crushing defeatism typically bore me and proceeded to write about a film in that vein whose relative sense of humanism made it more interesting. I guess this relentless stop-motion animated feature can be placed on the other end of the spectrum. It’s the downer of downers. But so, so incredible. Every image in it is gorgeous and arresting. I had to talk about it because its release will be limited and that’s a shame. Everyone who’s ever enjoyed a movie should have a chance to see this work. It almost defies description (though I’ll try). It’s the work of a master animator, creature designer and special effects wizard at the peak of his abilities.
I am not joking when I say that Mad God is the most visually stunning thing you will see this year. It’s not just the sets and creatures that are so unique and fascinating, it’s the way they’re framed and shot, because the creature designer is also the director. Everything is heavily detailed. Creatures move in tune with the nature of their physical forms and broken spirits, shuffling through a ruined world. A number of the images are even a little hazy, adding to the otherworldly and ancient flavor of this particular apocalypse. The color palette favors grays, browns, blacks and blood reds in some scenes and sepias, oranges, tans, and magentas in others. Fire, blood, rust, soot and nuclear winter are the tones in which Mad God screams and shudders.
Worker drones are ruled over via video feed from the evil dictator of this world, who’s played by Repo Man director Alex Cox.
The person who made this must be insane, you think to yourself as nightmare after nightmare unfolds in front of you. But no, it’s multiple Academy Award-winning effects designer Phil Tippett, dutifully using his time-honored stop-motion and go-motion animation techniques in a project that is entirely his own, letting his fertile imagination run wild. His creatures, sets, effects and photography are the pure visual phantasmagoria, the product of a man who spent his entire life drawing, sculpting, animating - building his realm - an aesthetic style for other filmmakers to incorporate into their own visions.
The magnificent fight against the skeleton warriors from the climax of Jason and the Argonauts, which inspired the bone army of Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness (1992).
A student of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion techniques for bringing fantastical beasts into live-action for technicolor epics like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason & The Argonauts (1963), Tippett worked in television designing creatures and building miniatures. His knack for fashioning dinosaurs found him work with kids TV programs and then cheesy 70’s creature features like The Crater Lake Monster (1977) and Piranha 3D (1978) before being hired to work on the first Star Wars feature. The creatures you see in the Mos Eisley cantina and the holographic game pieces being manipulated by R2D2 and Chewbacca on the Millenium Falcon were Tippett’s big break into the new arena of blockbuster moviemaking. Directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas wanted to break American cinema out of what they perceived as its funk of artsy self-pity and Tippett’s techniques and creativity would become highly in demand for their brand of classic storytelling and megaproduction that would either destroy cinema or save it depending on how you see it.
So many of the beasties and infernal machines from the movies people in my generation grew up with are the product of Tippett’s hands and mind that it may be easy to overlook why they’re so potent. In an industry that gives disproportionate amounts of attention to stars and high profile directors, it’s possible Tippett’s tremendous influence may have eluded many viewers. It’s easy to be wowed by movie visuals when you’re young. It’s when you revisit these creations at a later age that you’re able to see all the love that was put into them, the care and detail. If you were born after the advent of CGI and the assembly line rendering of these details is all you know, Mad God will feel like an entirely new kind of movie in the best way. This is because what you don’t get with today’s computer generated special effects, even at their most intricate, is the personal stamp of an artist and a unifying aesthetic in which to house the characters.
Like any human characters, even snarling beasts you see in fantasy must be given the freedom in which to physically express themselves and it’s with the ancient principles of animation and movement that this can be done, frame by frame. The thing you’re seeing on screen is real. It was made by one person rather than several people sitting at computer screens and it conforms to that person's idea of how it should move and think - the consistency of a singular vision. This kind of filmmaking is not just a technical process. It takes an artistic brain to use these tools to express character in the non-human. The effect these visuals have on us comes not from pushing the envelope technically, but because the artist at the helm incorporated those techniques into a developed aesthetic that expresses the continuity of vision that allows us to forget where we are.
This may be the reason that considering there is barely a recognizable trace of the world we live in to be found in Mad God (I’m convinced a good portion of it takes place near the Earth’s core), its cavernous monster lairs, freak surgery labs, bombed-out demilitarized zones, slave-operated hell factories and subterreanean tunnels all feel as if they’re housed inside a naturalistic filmmaking style. This gives the proceedings an ambiance that I believe is what helps make it so compulsively watchable.
When you watch the original King Kong (1933), the hairs on Kong’s body move as he moves. This was of course because there was nothing to do about the human hands that were ruffling the creature’s “fur” in the act of moving it a tiny bit, taking a photograph and repeating that process hundreds of times to simulate fluid motion. But what seems like it would be a lapse in continuity turns out to give the creature a kind of immediacy in its life on screen. Mad God’s dizzying array of evil doctors, underground beasts, radiation-mutated freaks and worker drones all carry this same immediacy. They are effectively alive on screen.
Tippett would continue to hone his skills after the unprecedented success of the first Star Wars movie. Staying on for the remainder of the trilogy as Lucas moved his now thriving new visual effects company - Industrial Light and Magic - to a bigger lot in San Rafael in 1978, Tippett would go on to create not only Jabba The Hutt and the Dagobah planet, but the lumbering AT-AT and AT-ST Walkers, applying the mechanics of animal locomotion to towering machine structures. The catastrophically malfunctioning ED-209 Assault Robot from Robocop (1987) and its upgrades in the sequels are classic Tippett creations and Tippett would become the only worker ever to be called a genius by Paul Verhoven when they’d reteam for the insectoid menace of Starship Troopers (1997). In Dragonslayer (1981), Tippett gives us the most beautifully realized dragon to be found in movies, one future CGI renderings were unable to improve upon. Jurassic Park (1993) found Tippett merging his style with the computer animations developed by Spielberg’s ace effects team to create new versions of the dinosaurs that dominated so much of the for-hire work earlier in his career. Many animators thought they’d be out of work when computer effects came along, but Tippett’s synchronicity of his own hand-wrought style with the act of animating images into a sequence within a computer program created a seamless effect that was unlike anything at the time.
Tippitt’s creatures - engines which run on the nightmare fuel that powered the millennial childhood
But with Mad God, which plays like the most perverse episode of Robot Chicken one can imagine, it’s not only Tippett’s talents as an effects man but as a filmmaker that are given full reign. Had the atomic bomb been fully developed before the start of World War II, this may have been what the resulting dystopia would have looked like decades later. The film follows a soldier dressed as a storm-trooper prepared for gas bombings and trench warfare, who never speaks and whose real face we never see. The nature of his lone mission is unclear as he surveys and traverses a series of barren landscapes, each like a descent into successively more gruesome concentric layers of Dante’s Inferno, beginning with an absolutely breathtaking image of a kind of Tower of Babel ziggurat from the underworld and spiraling downward from there.
I’m at a loss to describe any kind of formal plot, not so much because of the absence of any discernible one but because I was unable to detect one in a movie during which the most consistent thought I had was, “How in the world did he do that?!” One may not desire entertainments that are so visually stunning that the viewer is cut off from the ability to be moved by them (Sam Mendes’ recent 1917 is one such example). Obviously, any number of well-known Sci-Fi tropes and visual motifs help form these scenes. They have a kind of nostalgia about them for an apocalypse that never was, if that makes sense. A world resembling the possible retro-dystopia found in the Fallout video game series or the seemingly impenetrable Thomas Pynchon novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. But when brought together, what do they add up to? Perhaps Tippett should be thought of as more of an embroiderer than a storyteller, as he piles on a succession of worlds, each looking completely different from all the others, and populates them with a structural and biological latticework straight out of his imagination.
No two worlds in Mad God are the same. At times it may feel like overload or that Tippett is trying for more than he can achieve. Even if that were true, one can’t fault this level of trying.
These kinds of images and the tropes from which they’ve evolved are not without precedent. They recall the animated films of The Brothers Quay in their gallows humor and nostalgic old-country surrealism. Mad God may also share the sense of total unpredictability of the Quay Brothers best animations (like Street of Crocodiles [1986]) or the texture of some of David Lynch’s work. Critic Raymond Durgnat has pointed out that the theoretical implications of those films are fascinating, especially when the medium allows artists to synthesize realistic and non-realistic elements in such a way that blurs the space between them.
Where Tippett’s work is distinguished from that of the Brothers Quay is that this venture never seems like work. It’s more like Play, grounded in a worldview of the creator that’s never so politically imposing as to be distancing, despite the perverse sense of near-total horror. I believe there is meaning to be gleaned from Mad God’s free-floating pleasures, but only if one wants to do the work. Thus, gaining full membership to Tippett’s special world may not be the acquired taste it initially appears to be. To prep oneself for the visual sense of this wild ride, I’d recommend starting with some of the more famous music videos for Tool, which utilize similar tones in their uses of stop-motion animation.
Tippett also makes use of “go-motion” techniques for articulating his characters. The staccato look of most stop-motion animation is a product of a given subject’s stillness when it’s photographed. Creatures are moved when the camera isn’t rolling. With go-motion animation, the camera shutter is opened when the subject is in motion. So motion is created with invisible means and filmed during the duration of that motion, which creates the blurred effect of the subject’s movement that Tippett is such a fan of. Tippett’s use of go-motion for his dragon in Dragonslayer or the Tauntaun creatures of the ice planet in The Empire Strikes Back are what give those creatures that eerie, extra-worldly sense that feels distinctly cinematic in terms of the effect they create. They feel like the stuff of pure fantasy. These blurrings are present in every scene of Mad God and they add to the suggestion of a world that’s become alien, their murkiness adding to (but without insisting on) the feel of a cinematic landscape that’s too impossibly damaged and deformed to know.
And Tippett himself has no ego to speak of, no interest in fame, accolades and awards, no desire for recognition by Hollywood’s elite. He speaks about his work with zero sense of shmooze or pretense about what he does and has no desire to do anything else. If he’s credited for dancing inside the costume of the long-snouted blue creature at Jabba The Hutt’s palace in Return of the Jedi and taking over the filming of Robocop 2 in 1987 for an in-over-his-head Irvin Kershner, it’s only because no one else was around to get the job done. If his Oscars have any redeeming value for him, it’s in their capacity to create more opportunities for work - quietly plugging away in his secluded countryside workshop, making his creatures and bringing them to life, colonizing whole worlds using metallic joints, spirit gum, enamel paint, and a set of patient and careful hands.
Mad God is more than a piece of showy craftsmanship. It is simply the product of a first-rate artist having a field day. It was worked on in phases by Tippett over thirty years, released in five minute installments about every five years, with a Kickstarter drive being deployed in 2017 to help finish it. This also makes it a sort of document of the technological advancements in this milieu over that same period of time. Tippett fuses the tried-and-true techniques of live-action animation with what he’d learned using digital input devices and motion capture for Jurassic Park that thirty years later, are in substantially more sophisticated phases of their evolution.
And yet, they don’t look entirely pristine, which I think may be the element that makes them so alluring, despite the totally inhuman and extreme nature of the material. The animated worlds of Pixar or Dreamworks are vibrant, crisp and pristine - even when they want to depict grime and mess. It’s because of this hyper-vibrancy and cleanliness that I’m usually at a distance from them, no matter how good the movies themselves can sometimes be. I prefer the human mark of a single obsessive creator with their own spin. Cinema has so many brilliant people but so few actual visionaries.
In a way, it may be a tribute to this work that I have utterly failed to describe what is going on in Mad God, which means that it probably doesn’t matter. A computer can be programmed to play the notes in a classical concerto perfectly. But only an imperfect human artist can offer a take on the music, with the kinds of flourishes unique to that individual that can have the deepest potential for responsive engagement. That’s essentially what Mad God is - an imprint. A reflection of the absurdity of Phil Tippett’s view of the world. It’s how a special effects master makes sense of his response to human agony, pulling his audience into his one-of-a-kind realization of pure Hell.
Mad God is making the rounds with single screenings at independent theaters across the country. A screening in Chicago is scheduled for Friday, June 24th at The Music Box theater. The full schedule for remaining screenings can be found on the film’s website here: https://www.madgodmovie.com/madgod-about . The film is also available for streaming on Shudder.
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