Mad God
The long awaited, long in production, Magnum Opus of animator and special effects legend Phil Tippett. The term "Magnum Opus" of course, having it's origin in alchemical mysticism, which is quite appropriate, considering Mad God seems to be partly rooted in it. It's a lavishly produced stop motion picture of around 80 minutes depicting various layers of a nightmarish hellscape and many of the convoluted and incomprehensible biological, mechanical and mystical processes happening in it.
Suffice to say, this is not a movie you watch for the story. Mad God is cinema of the purely visual kind. Tippett conjures up some of the most beautifully grotesque imagery ever put to film, at the very least with this level of production value. Stop Motion Animation is often considered an artistic excess by it's very nature. Generally seen as too difficult and too expensive an animation style to be commercially viable and kept alive practically by a handful of studios doing it purely for the art. Mad God has little in common with a Laika or Aardman production, much more with, say, Gerald Scarfe's animations for The Wall or the kind of digital outsider art produced by independent animators on the internet like M Dot Strange or Jimmy Screamerclawz.
It's, frankly, one hell of a thing to commit 30 years of your life to. That's a long time to dwell in the depths of stop motion hell and Tippett makes damn sure to immerse his audience in it the best he can. A wide variety of messed up creatures are seen dwelling in a wide variety of messed up environments, industrial hellscapes, war zones, dilapidated hospitals, we see a wide variety of horrific places and things that happen in them.
It's difficult to talk about what the substance of Mad God is, exactly, beyond its imagery alone. We start of with the image of the Tower of Babel and a quote from the bible and those spiritual musings seem to be at the center of Mad God. It would seem like Mad God is trying to depict a world devoid of divine grace, a place where darkness, death, violence and heresy rule. Despite it's utter desolation, though, it's also quite vibrant in its own way, full of life and creation, bizarre and diseased as it may seem to us. There are two sequences of events in Mad God that one could perhaps describe as plotlines. One involves mass produced soldiers trying to detonate an explosive under the order of what seems to be an elderly mage with claws on his hands and feet and another one which involves a worm like infant being carried from a hospital to the laboratory of an alchemist. The latter of which probably has the clearest structure and payoff to it.
I suppose at the end of the day, there are two ways to look at Mad God. One is taking it literally as a work of surrealist fantasy that is applicable, but not directly allegorical to any material reality. The other one, of course, is to read it as an allegory and look for a concrete metaphor behind every single one of its individual elements. Everyone has their own viewpoint when it comes to this, but straight up, I was never a big fan of the latter approach. I think there is little value to a film that can't, at least to some extent, be taken literally and only presents itself as a text to be decoded and translated, and I think Mad God is imbued with too much passion, emotion and creativity to be just that.
I'm unable to say what Tippett's intentions were but I can say quite confidently that he created something wholly unique and beautiful with Mad God. There are plently of clear influences, with some direct references to paintings of Hieronymous Bosch or Zdzisław Beksiński or films like David Lynch's Eraserhead or Henry Sellick's Nightmare Before Christmas. But at the center of it is a phantastical and phantasmagorical journey into a world that got to grow and gestate inside Phillipp Tippett's mind for multiple decades. If anything, it would be a dissapointment if it were easy to relate to.
Mad God is a thoroughly immersive, stylistically unique and textually ambitious descent into one of the most beautiful wastelands ever put to film. A visceral place of manifold textures, sounds and processes of byzantine complexity. A movie asking to be experienced and contemplated, more so than interpreted. It's an acquired taste, but a very rich and unusual one.