Mad God

A film without speech. A figure in a helmet is lowered underground in a diving bell and descends layer by layer: factories worked by slaves, operating tables, creatures rising out of mud, battlefields. He carries a map and a bomb. There is no narrative; what happens is a descent. Phil Tippett wrote, directed and largely made it with his own hands. Tippett is one of the major figures in stop-motion animation, responsible for the creature work on Star Wars and RoboCop. It took more than thirty years. Tippett began in 1989 and produced a few minutes of animation by 1990. Then, on the set of Jurassic Park, he saw how far computer animation had come, concluded that stop motion was finished, and shelved Mad God. He won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1994 as animation supervisor on that same film. The project revived in 2010 when props from the nineties resurfaced. His team pushed him to finish it and the work went ahead with volunteers giving up weekends. A Kickstarter in 2012 passed its 40,000 dollar target and raised 124,156. In August 2021 it became a feature, with more than thirty minutes of new material added to the earlier chapters. It won Most Groundbreaking Film at the Fantasia Film Festival in 2021 and Best Film at the Ray Harryhausen Awards in 2022. It went out on Shudder on 16 June 2022. Who it is for: viewers who like handmade animation and visual films without narrative. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a story or dialogue. Not a word is spoken across eighty minutes and most of what is shown is repellent.