Stop-Motion-Ani-May-Tion!: Mad God (Dir Phil Tippett, 1h28m, 2021)

Since its beginnings, stop-motion animation has brought the monstrous to life. Willis O'Brien's dinosaurs, and his most famous creation, King Kong, would frighten audiences in the 1920s, and 1930s; his successor, the great Ray Harryhausen, would create the terrifying Talos and the iconic skeletal warriors of Jason and the Argonauts, and the equally unnerving Medusa for Clash of the Titans and Cyclops for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, whilst Czech animator Jan Švankmajer's surreal visions of Alice in Wonderland and Faust are as unnerving as they are original.

These are just notable examples; there are hundreds of other masters of the craft whose creations still haunt the childhoods of film-going generations. This is all the past now; our monsters and machines and creatures used to move at 24 painstaking frames a second, birthed of rubber or foam latex or fabric or plastic, atop skeletons of metal, brought to life a still at a time. No longer. Yet, in Mad God, a film that took three decades to complete, so the monsters return, from the mind, and hands of perhaps the greatest living special effects animator.

The Assassin surveys the scene in an early sequence of Mad God

It is late 1991; three men are gathered around a computer monitor; one is Steven Spielberg, the second is ILM's Dennis Muren, a pioneer of special effects. The third is Phil Tippett, the pioneer of "go-motion", which adds a photorealistic blur to each shot of the puppet. Tippett is already a veteran of animation, having created effects for Star Wars and its sequels, the titular dragon of Dragonslayer, and the ED-209 security robot for Robocop; he and Muren have already shared one Academy Award, for 1983's Return of the Jedi, whilst Tippett has won an Emmy for his work on the documentary Dinosaur! Spielberg wants to do his dinosaurs in the same way, for his new film, Jurassic Park: Tippett will be leading the animation team. Yet, the short piece of film the three are watching is about to make, in Tippett's own words, his entire line of work, extinct; Muren's tests are of a fully CGI T-Rex, and his work will change the landscape of cinema forever.

Unknown to Spielberg and Muren, in his spare time, Tippett is slowly making a stop-motion film, his passion project; whilst Tippett will become the film's dinosaur consultant, and his decades of work as an animator will become invaluable, Tippett believes stop-motion has had its days. The film goes into hibernation. Twenty years later, encouraged by his animators, so Tippett returns to working on the film, backed by Kickstarter, the first three parts of the film soon released on YouTube, whilst Tippett, and his staff, largely working around other project each weekend, toil away on the other half of the film, a process so stressful that Tippett will spend part of 2021 in a psychiatric ward. Like Rodin's Gates of Hell, another decades-in-the-making vision of the infernal, there is something spectacular in the mere fact of its completion.

Mad God is a film of spectacular, and often unsettling, grotesques.

Yet, as with Junk Head's production, it is not merely the journey, but its destination we must consider. Mad God is, certainly a visually stunning piece of cinema; its opening images, of a colossal tower haloed by a dreadful deep sun, atop which a figure rises, only to be blasted by lightning as the tower is enveloped by cloud, Berlioz' "Dies Irae" at full blast certainly sets the tone of what is to come. Welcome to hell. Welcome to Mad God. Thus, we are introduced to our protagonist, the Assassin, a World War I-esque figure, -dressed in gasmask,helmet and trenchcoat. He is one of hundreds of puppets, though the film contains a number of live-action performances inserted into the work

His mission is simply to traverse this landscape, and place a bomb to destroy it. Not a word of dialogue goes to explaining this; in revealing terms, and showing some of Tippett's bleak humour, the only spoken words in Mad God are "Oh no!", they are spoken by a small mushroom creature, and said creature is summarily crushed. The scale of his journey is impressive; we see him pass a gargantuan ammonite on his descent, at points he, and the transport he uses to get here, are dwarfed by a battlefield, a graveyard, a weapons depot, and the pure scale of this world Phil Tippett and his crew have created. This journey though, is dominated by Tippett's skill as a puppet-builder and film maker. For, at base, Mad God is an almost entirely visual, character-driven, experience.

Despite a lack of dialogue, and a barebones plot, Mad God is a spectacle of stop-start animation

All manner of grotesques inhabit the screen, from disturbingly toothy screaming homunculi-so nightmarishly memorably that it graces the poster-to a small herd of fleshy, grub producing, and decidedly disturbing creatures, to the Baconesque mouth of the otherwise unseen Overseer, whose mewling, babbling, appearance on the screens is as disturbing as any physically appearing creature. The creatures they oversee are as pathetic as they are disturbing, a mass-produced race made of filth, and worked to destruction, their deaths as violent as they are unnoticed, crushed, run over, set on fire, and onward. One could certainly draw much thematic intent from this; the mechanisation of their death, for example, features plant equipment clearing up the dead, to reform them and begin the cycle again. This implication is as disturbing as anything outright depicted on screen.

This dark philosophy rears its head several times: with such little tangible narrative than the Assassin’s journey, and what lies at the end of it, it is possible to arrive at many meanings for the film's imagery. Undoubtedly, the film has Biblical echoes, but these are refracted through the many visual depictors of Hell, and may leave the viewer pleplexed. Is God dead? Is he the Mad God of the title? Is he the shadowy figure sending the Assassin into hell to destroy it? Is everything in the grip of some ongoing Armageddon, some Forever War where tanks and bombs do battle with angels, a mechanised Revelations ? One could even read Tippett himself as the Mad God, a passionate creator finally returning to the world he built to finish its story; one even catches a flash of those dinosaurs that seemed to end stop-motion forever, buried right at the beginning of the Assassin's journey, not to mention allusions to several projects the director regards as influences, or worked upon.

Phil Tippett, animating one of the film's more memorable grotesques.

This is to assume there is some theme to Mad God, other than Tippett's own dogged determination; the film's latter half becomes more abstract, less hellish, the material most recently shot that forms the final third suggesting God is mad from trying to keep the whole thing going than any act of random brutality. The thinness of plot may even suggest that Tippett is content to allow us to ascribe any theme we choose onto this, whilst he gets on with showing us a multitude of strange and barbaric creatures that spring alive on screen. Is Phil pulling a cosmic joke on us? We certainly descend into Hell, but is this the hell of Bruegel and Blake, Bosch and Bacon, of Goya and Milton? Is this "Fucking Hell", the Chapmans' smartarse Sixth-Former colossal slab of plastic Nazi butchery, or the gloriously over-the-top hell of Warhammer 40,000? Is it both?

It's Mad God by Phil Tippett.

Perhaps its plot may not quite match the infernal baroque of its visuals, but Mad God is thirty years of a man's life spat out in foam latex and blood and viscera and gunk, a seemingly insane Babel of a film, finally cresting the heavens, triumphant. Many superlatives come to mind; a mad, brilliant, bizarre, what the fuck of a movie, but simply, it's stop-motion's last maker of monsters finally-finally-completing his opus.

Rating: Must See

Mad God is available on DVD and BluRay from Shudder. It is available for streaming via Shudder

Next week, to less apocalyptic fare, as we enter The House for three very different stop-motion tales.