Three decades in the making, Phil Tippett’s Mad God depicts a descent into a hellish underworld akin to a stop-motion version of the animation from Pink Floyd: The Wall crossed with the most surrealist paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. Following his Oscar-winning visual effects work on Jurassic Park, Tippett shelved the project, believing that stop-motion animation may be going the way of the dinosaur. He continued visual effects work on major blockbusters until friends convinced him to revisit his passion project some 20 years later, and after Tippett crowdfunded most of the film’s modest budget, the dark depths plumbed in Mad God finally saw the light of day with a theatrical release in 2022.
Though not an overtly political film, Mad God depicts a phantasmagoric world ravaged by the military-industrial complex run amok, a grievously damaged place stalked by monsters and fueled by grisly death, populated with faceless dronelike beings created solely to serve as fodder for the machines, where the biological and the technological become fiendishly intertwined. Religious trappings also pervade the film, as it opens with an image of an ancient ziggurat, perhaps the Tower of Babel, becoming enshrouded by dark, ominous clouds. A title card then offers the dialogue-less film’s only words, a few verses from Leviticus in which a vengeful god unleashes annihilative wrath upon those who would dare disobey him. The hideous dystopia we go on to witness is a world rendered feral and monstrous by war, soulless industry, twisted religion and medicine gone mad.
The film’s main character, insofar as there is one within these nightmarish tableaux, is a silent figure in a helmet, flak jacket and gas mask who’s lowered via diving bell into the bowels of this hell. He’s equipped with a rapidly disintegrating map and a briefcase that appears to contain a timebomb. He descends through smoke-filled skies of cannon fire and layers of degradation and relics, some containing dinosaur bones or ancient statues. When he finally reaches the floor of this vile abyss, the film turns darker and far stranger, as the assassin nimbly makes his way past beastly creatures wielding meat cleavers and electrocuted giants defecating slime into the greedy mouth of a gargantuan, half-mechanical head.
Before the assassin can complete his mission, he’s snatched by a lurking creature and has his ribcage wrenched open on an operating table. A doctor pulls jewelry and currency from the viscera before extracting the large, pulsating larva he seeks and then connects the assassin’s brain to a television screen. There’s additional religious imagery in a ghostly, floating plague doctor entity transporting the larval creature to ceremoniously be transformed into liquid gold, and by this point of the film the viewer will firmly be either engrossed or repelled depending on their disposition for such avant-horror.
Tippett’s greatest achievement here is the juxtaposition of chaotic depravity with mechanical pacing, whether it’s the slow descent of the diving bell or the various long, steady drives by the assassin via motorcycle or army jeep. There’s deliberate churning amid spasmodic eruption and unpredictable grotesquery alongside ordered brutality. There’s a sacred profanity throughout this work, as a master of his craft world-builds the result of humanity’s basest impulses made manifest. Tippett’s attention to detail creates a disturbing yet sumptuous visual feast‒an attentive eye even glimpses a brief easter egg of stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a specific influence cited by Tippett.
Eyeballs appear in strange places throughout the film, enmeshed within oozing flesh or even peering out from within machinery. In doing so, Tippett alludes to humanity’s penchant for witnessing atrocity and yet still unaffectedly churning the meat grinder. Frenetically violent sequences are contrasted with deliberate or even strangely ethereal moments, and the whole experience boils down to beautiful ugliness.
Ultimately, the cyclical nature of all biological processes comes to the fore. Mad God illustrates how we exist within the paradox of interchangeability and uniqueness. How each individual matters and yet is merely another accumulation of matter. How immediacy exists even within the inevitable. A high-water mark for stop-motion animation, Mad God conveys how as unforgiving as the physical world may be, the most hellish realm just might exist within the human mind.
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