You will see and hear words like STAR WARS, Ray Harryhausen and stop motion. These words are useful but also empty in any conversation about MAD GOD from Phil Tippett. His work has been featured in multiple arenas, including STAR WARS and that lumbering beast called the Rancor monster. He saw Ray Harryhausen masterful work as a child and was obsessed. Many of us were by the skeletons. Yes, stop motion and its techniques have been various in his work and many others through film history. This didnt all translate into much for many of us, but in the brilliantly bizarre world of MAD GOD and that churning, crazed genius of Tippett, it does. A hellish landscape of decayed fragments that slowly melt into a myriad range of perversely abstract nightmares that a trundling figure called The Assassin navigates.

Felling like a Dante Inferno of secular, Amricana capitalism, it is a potent hell. There are tortured souls that writh, decrepit stone bunkers that creak and wretched monstrosities who lumber. Primordial horrors on one side. The decay into oblivion on the other. Its a stomach crunching thing that upsets some and inspires others. I enjoyed it but take it slowly. The extra content glean that this might be the subconscious mind of Tippett. A polluted place of stench and demonics. The documentary, filmed at the creation stage, seems to suggest it is a blend of the semi tragic, supernatural and sadistic ideas that are a data dump of loves and losses. The film is layered enough that you need time and multiple tides to maybe find what you are looking for. There are moments where you see dentures, wooden hulks and tendens but its like little before. Tippetts mentions artists that inspired him but he has run past these. He is the world’s pre-eminent stop motion animator. Painstakingly animating with traditional stop-motion techniques.

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