Countless, lonely hours bent over worktables and a posture that would drain anyone’s life expectancy: The film hurts with it. Like in the films of Jodie Mack, especially 2019’s The Grand Bizarre, Mad God represents the labor and the time taken to make it, conspicuously tactile with creation. Maybe it’s easy to romanticize a stop-motion animator (who was a consultant on The Force Awakens, but admits he pretty much just cashed checks) in an era that’s long obsolesced any practice but CGI, but Tippett’s brought a whole medium back screaming from a nightmare into the light. It’s much more pictorially and sound-art-oriented than a typical Hollywood theatrical feature.” This is coming from the guy who conjured up the AT-AT attack on Hoth, crafted and animated Tauntauns and the Rancor the genius inimitable due to his contributions to Robocop, Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers, a soul exposed to both the meanest and most successful exigencies of knuckles-down moviemaking in the past 50 years. As Tippett says in that same interview, “If Mad God is about anything, it’s about scale and process…That’s the backbone. Mad God chronicles it both in form and function. Effort and toil and a crumbling mental state occupy most of Tippett’s recollections of the whole process one imagines half his life racked with torment over a passion project that’s brought him nothing but pain. “I hated working on Mad God,” he told Inverse, and there’s little evidence to support otherwise. A stop-motion film 30 years in the making-beginning with an idea sparked during a lull in shooting Robocop 2- Mad God is mostly the work of one man, legendary animator Phil Tippett, every elaborately nauseating set hand-fashioned over the course of decades. It would be a pretty clearly nihilistic piece of work, too, were it not such a careful, frequently astounding achievement. It’s deeply upsetting, and often just as stirring.
#Movie explorer consulting a map series#
In a series of ever-obliterating visions, Mad God reduces the human experience to cosmic chum. You see whole universes of innocent creatures suffering behind heavy vault-like doors, within the memories of one disposable martyr after another, in the spaces yet to be born. And just when you think you’ve reached the bottom of Hell, convinced there are no more realms of the beyond left to unveil, you see there is always more bottom, always more beyond. (All while I crammed so-called “Cheez-Its” down my gullet, watching and ceaselessly consuming.) Your pleasing odors escape un-savored into the ether. A so-called “She-it,” a screeching, walking tumor of hair and bared teeth, defends her beaked young against the mania of Mad God’s wasteland, wielding a cleaver. All is grist, everything is decay, human bodies little more than rag dolls made of shit. Medical malpractice means more than negligence, it means quacks and ghouls elbow-deep in your guts.
Punishment and apocalypse are writ large and brown in feces and industrial run-off. Though it begins by quoting the 26th chapter of Leviticus-“I will lay your cities in ruin and make your sanctuaries desolate and I will not savor your pleasing odors”- Mad God plays out like the Book of Revelation.
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