Film Review: "Mad God" (2021).

"A journey beyond your wildest nightmares." This is Mad God. This stop motion-live-action hybrid horror film written, produced, and directed by Phil Tippett. It is a fully practical stop-motion film set in a Miltonesque world of monsters, mad scientists, and war pigs. A figure known as "The Assasin" as descends from the heavens into a nightmarish pit full of monsters, titans and cruelty.

Born on September 27, 1951, Oscar and Emmy Award-winning visual effects supervisor and filmmaker, Phil Tippett, specializes in creature design, stop-motion and computerised character animation. Over his career, he has assisted ILM and DreamWorks, and in 1984 formed his own company, Tippett Studio. His work has appeared in movies such as the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, and RoboCop (just to name a few). In 1987, while working on Robocop 2 (1990), Tippett, the legendary visual effects and stop-motion craftsman, embarked upon an ambitious personal project, fabricating and animating a darkly surreal world in which the creatures and nightmares of his imagination could roam free. Tippett produced dozens of environments and hundreds of puppets for the project, filling notebook after notebook with thousands of detailed sketches and storyboards. Decades after the success of Tippett Studio forced production into stasis, a group of animators at Tippett Studio came upon boxes of shelved props and puppets. After viewing the original footage, they convinced Phil to resurrect the project. The small group began volunteering their weekends to the film, and before long it had snowballed into a crew of more than sixty artists. The scene with the mountain of dead soldiers was done by melting thousands of little army men together on wire, and it took six people three years to complete the scene. A wildly successful KickStarter campaign provided funding for materials and equipment. Each piece of the film is hand crafted, independent and created from the heart. The film has no audible dialogue, and consists almost entirely of stop-motion animation and puppet work, although there are a few live-action sequences where actors in puppet suits were used. Sometimes that heart is bursting with love for the craft, while other times it's macabre, punctured, and bleeding. The film is a mature one crafted from techniques & technologies that span the history of cinema and the career of a true animation mastermind. The first chapters of the film were unleashed on the world via Kickstarter campaigns. Starting in August, 2021 - the film debuted as a Feature Film, combining the earlier chapters and adding 30+ additional minutes of content to fulfill Tippett's thirty-year vision.

Its glorious proliferation of hellish transformations works like a charm on anyone who values the imagination. The film takes us back to a time in the history of movies when audiences responded to the images on screen with a combination of awe and fear, when in submitting to them, we felt as if we were submitting to a spell. Not necessarily for young kids, this is a surrealist version with a great deal of attention accorded to objects.

Simon says Mad God receives: