And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation
There are a few different ways we can make sense of the title of Mad God, a new stop-motion animated feature that's also not very new at all: with some footage dating back to 1989, it's one of the longest-in-production films to have ever been released. But probably the simplest explanation is the one we encounter first: God exists, and He is Mad at us. This film, which will spend virtually all of its punishing 83-minute runtime tracking a trip down, down, ever further down into a pit of horrors opens with a brief glimpse of the exact opposite, a tower stretching up into the heavens, the briefest of attempts to show humankind striving for Heaven before taking us on an inexorable tour of Hell. And no sooner have wee seen that tower than it swamped by pitch-black clouds, filling the orange-red sky and taking with the lat glimpse we will ever have of a world that isn't defined by subterranean decay. It's an obvious reference to the Tower of Babel, a symbol in the Abrahamic religions of humankind's punishment for attempting to rise up to the level of the divine. And Once it has been swallowed, and the film's title appears in blood-red lettering that fills the frame, we get a title crawl that represents a huge majority of the decipherable text we will ever see or hear in the film, only somewhat legible beneath a storm of synthetic film scratches; it it's a quote from Leviticus 26, verses 27-33 - the angriest book in the Bible, and maybe the angriest portion of that angriest book, the bit where God explains with violent enthusiasm just what He'll do to His people if they cross Him.
And that, perhaps, is what Mad God is: the world as an unending punishment, incommensurate to whatever sin might have been committed. It is a fallen, world, clearly; the impression the film gives is that the world of the living is ruined and waste, and that what we're seeing is the even more ruined remnant of something far more acncient still upon which that world has been built, in all its instability.
Another more fanciful possibility is that the mad god is Phil Tippett, the film's director and creator of basically everything we see in it; "mad" in the sense that it has taken a fair degree of focused insanity to conceive of the nightmare imagery we see here, and having conceived of it, kept the dream alive of making it alive for so long. Tippett is by trade a visual effects artist and stop-motion animator, the father of "go-motion", a specific form of stop-motion animation in which slight blurring effects are introduced to create smoother and more realistic simulated movement; it was first used in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, and appeared a few more times over the 1980s, but was supplanted by CGI in the early 1990s. Tippett was also known for his celebrated creature designs (most notably the vast managerie of Return of the Jedi), and that becomes important for Mad God, which in some ways feels like a whole bunch of Star Wars creatures have been subjected to the torments of Hell, and this is what it has in lieu of a "story".
At any rate, it was during the production of 1990's RoboCop 2 that Tippett came up with the idea for Mad God and began making it (truth be told, I'm not actually clear on whether any of the material produced in 1990 actually made it into the final cut), but it was quickly shelved; apparently, Tippett considered that stop-motion had no future after Jurassic Park (to which he was initially attached, bringing the latest and greatest incarnation of go-motion to the screen) embraced CGI instead. Two decades later, in 2010, a young generation of animators encouraged him to pick up the old project, and with the aid of Kickstarter, Mad God went into the closest version of "full" production it would ever reach, which basically meant having animation students and other volunteers come in on the weekends to help Tippett execute the meticulous plans he devises over the week. A mere eleven years later, at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival, the film finally premiered, and here we are, in 2022, and only 32 years after he came up with the notion, Tippett has finally been able to spring Mad God onto mass audiences.
It's difficult to say if the film is "worth the wait"; can anything but the literal best movie ever made truly live up to that kind of wind-up? And Mad God certainly isn't the literal best movie ever made. It's still pretty audacious, though, and self-evidently essential viewing for fans of stop-motion animation, soul-wracking dives into morbid hellscapes, or both. Regardless of what horror he apparently sees when he closes his eyes, Tippett is a phenomenal stop-motion artist, having created several wonderfully iconic animated sequences across the 1980s (he's even responsible for the solitary good thing to come out of the notorious Howard the Duck), and the opportunity to see 83 minutes of his wizardry on display is reason enough to care about Mad God. With the caveat that there are in fact considerably fewer than 83 minutes of animation here; several sequences, which have been carved out from the rest for fairly straightforward narrative reasons, are live-action footage that has been tinkered with in post to give it a jerky, broken feeling. But the rest of it is just sterling stuff, lovingly detailed animation packed with details of movement in the backgrounds and within the backgrounds of backgrounds, a chaotic anthill of activity all around. One doesn't need to have the whole messy story of how Tippett forced this into the world to be able to feel the deep love that went into making it.
I have thus far not described what Mad God actually is, which is in part because it's simultaneously so straightforward as to have no story worth mentioning, and so hallucinatory as to make its story almost beside the point. But basically, there's a man in a gas mask and full-body jacket who rides in a diving bell down into the bowels of the earth, wandering through an underground landscape full of torture and degradation; bodies being torn apart, crushed, mutilated; hulking beasts defecating streams of shit everywhere. Here, he plans to set a bomb, presumably to wipe this wretched place out, if not to replace it with something better, then at least to prevent it from continuing to exist.
It's all very gloomy and abject, though eventually, the film turns a corner and starts to find the warped beauty in this mutant landscape; it even begins to achieve a kind of spiritual ecstasy from out of the muck and suffering, though whether this is meant to be a sign of transcending and escaping Hell or going completely mad due its torments is tough to say, even after two viewings. Frankly, it's tough to say exactly what's going on in the film's last third. But it's also largely beside the point, I think. Mad God is a sensory experience far more than it's about storytelling or even world-building, and the sensations it triggers are profound. Right from the start, as the man descends into the pit, past a massive skull of some ancient elder god, the film is immediately stirring something mythic and primordial, a vision of the truly ancient and truly cosmic that twists into a kind of industrial system of crushing the life out of fleshy, mutable organisms. There's some Bosch in here, and some of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, in the sense that this is all designed as the temple to the worship of some dismal dark god of machinery; the main character looks for all the world like he stepped out of World War I. The live-action human footage evokes the unspeakable medical experimentation of Nazi eugenicists, and it's clearly part of the film's strategy to shift over to actual people with actual bodies for this sequence about the vicious things that can be done by people to other people in some perverse attempt at doing a kind of degraded, awful "science" (that it's strategy doesn't entirely make it feel like the film hasn't quietly given up and thrown in several minutes of footage that didn't need to be animated as a labor-saving device, one that rather bluntly shifts the mood away from the phantasmagorical and surreal).
It's a neat, noxious parade of nearly every form of violent suffering that you could think of, giving way to that sort-of transcendence at the end; by God, does Tippett make us earn it. While the visuals slope by in their horrors, the soundtrack hammers and screams and drones away, with awful sounds of babies babbling as a constant organic counterpoint to all of the metal (in one of the film's most startling image, the babbling is paired with a low-res monitor showing a composite of a live-action face, like a human baby was badly constructed by creatures that didn't know what one was supposed to look like). And behind even that, Dan Wool's soundtrack plinks away heavily, like it's being played on a rusty piano. I don't even know how a piano can be rusty, but Mad God has one anyways.
It's an extraordinary experience, exhausting and unpleasant, and it breaks my heart how few people will ever get to see it on the big screen (after a cursory tour of theaters, it ended up as an exclusive on the streaming service Shudder) - I've seen it twice now, once on an a huge film festival auditorium and once on a television, and there's not the remotest comparison to be made between the two. On TV, it was unsettling delirium; projected in a theater, it felt like being in prison, one of the damned souls myself. And that's quite an experience, even if it's not likely to be everybody's jam. Nothing about this is meant to be everybody's jam; it's too idiosyncratic and committed to its all-encompassing vision of misery. But given that explicit goal, it's an extraordinary achievement, with its animation fluidly and organically creating a dizzying slide into Hell itself that's such a truly special exercise in visionary craftsmanship that even the horrific content is made somehow inspiring.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And that, perhaps, is what Mad God is: the world as an unending punishment, incommensurate to whatever sin might have been committed. It is a fallen, world, clearly; the impression the film gives is that the world of the living is ruined and waste, and that what we're seeing is the even more ruined remnant of something far more acncient still upon which that world has been built, in all its instability.
Another more fanciful possibility is that the mad god is Phil Tippett, the film's director and creator of basically everything we see in it; "mad" in the sense that it has taken a fair degree of focused insanity to conceive of the nightmare imagery we see here, and having conceived of it, kept the dream alive of making it alive for so long. Tippett is by trade a visual effects artist and stop-motion animator, the father of "go-motion", a specific form of stop-motion animation in which slight blurring effects are introduced to create smoother and more realistic simulated movement; it was first used in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, and appeared a few more times over the 1980s, but was supplanted by CGI in the early 1990s. Tippett was also known for his celebrated creature designs (most notably the vast managerie of Return of the Jedi), and that becomes important for Mad God, which in some ways feels like a whole bunch of Star Wars creatures have been subjected to the torments of Hell, and this is what it has in lieu of a "story".
At any rate, it was during the production of 1990's RoboCop 2 that Tippett came up with the idea for Mad God and began making it (truth be told, I'm not actually clear on whether any of the material produced in 1990 actually made it into the final cut), but it was quickly shelved; apparently, Tippett considered that stop-motion had no future after Jurassic Park (to which he was initially attached, bringing the latest and greatest incarnation of go-motion to the screen) embraced CGI instead. Two decades later, in 2010, a young generation of animators encouraged him to pick up the old project, and with the aid of Kickstarter, Mad God went into the closest version of "full" production it would ever reach, which basically meant having animation students and other volunteers come in on the weekends to help Tippett execute the meticulous plans he devises over the week. A mere eleven years later, at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival, the film finally premiered, and here we are, in 2022, and only 32 years after he came up with the notion, Tippett has finally been able to spring Mad God onto mass audiences.
It's difficult to say if the film is "worth the wait"; can anything but the literal best movie ever made truly live up to that kind of wind-up? And Mad God certainly isn't the literal best movie ever made. It's still pretty audacious, though, and self-evidently essential viewing for fans of stop-motion animation, soul-wracking dives into morbid hellscapes, or both. Regardless of what horror he apparently sees when he closes his eyes, Tippett is a phenomenal stop-motion artist, having created several wonderfully iconic animated sequences across the 1980s (he's even responsible for the solitary good thing to come out of the notorious Howard the Duck), and the opportunity to see 83 minutes of his wizardry on display is reason enough to care about Mad God. With the caveat that there are in fact considerably fewer than 83 minutes of animation here; several sequences, which have been carved out from the rest for fairly straightforward narrative reasons, are live-action footage that has been tinkered with in post to give it a jerky, broken feeling. But the rest of it is just sterling stuff, lovingly detailed animation packed with details of movement in the backgrounds and within the backgrounds of backgrounds, a chaotic anthill of activity all around. One doesn't need to have the whole messy story of how Tippett forced this into the world to be able to feel the deep love that went into making it.
I have thus far not described what Mad God actually is, which is in part because it's simultaneously so straightforward as to have no story worth mentioning, and so hallucinatory as to make its story almost beside the point. But basically, there's a man in a gas mask and full-body jacket who rides in a diving bell down into the bowels of the earth, wandering through an underground landscape full of torture and degradation; bodies being torn apart, crushed, mutilated; hulking beasts defecating streams of shit everywhere. Here, he plans to set a bomb, presumably to wipe this wretched place out, if not to replace it with something better, then at least to prevent it from continuing to exist.
It's all very gloomy and abject, though eventually, the film turns a corner and starts to find the warped beauty in this mutant landscape; it even begins to achieve a kind of spiritual ecstasy from out of the muck and suffering, though whether this is meant to be a sign of transcending and escaping Hell or going completely mad due its torments is tough to say, even after two viewings. Frankly, it's tough to say exactly what's going on in the film's last third. But it's also largely beside the point, I think. Mad God is a sensory experience far more than it's about storytelling or even world-building, and the sensations it triggers are profound. Right from the start, as the man descends into the pit, past a massive skull of some ancient elder god, the film is immediately stirring something mythic and primordial, a vision of the truly ancient and truly cosmic that twists into a kind of industrial system of crushing the life out of fleshy, mutable organisms. There's some Bosch in here, and some of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, in the sense that this is all designed as the temple to the worship of some dismal dark god of machinery; the main character looks for all the world like he stepped out of World War I. The live-action human footage evokes the unspeakable medical experimentation of Nazi eugenicists, and it's clearly part of the film's strategy to shift over to actual people with actual bodies for this sequence about the vicious things that can be done by people to other people in some perverse attempt at doing a kind of degraded, awful "science" (that it's strategy doesn't entirely make it feel like the film hasn't quietly given up and thrown in several minutes of footage that didn't need to be animated as a labor-saving device, one that rather bluntly shifts the mood away from the phantasmagorical and surreal).
It's a neat, noxious parade of nearly every form of violent suffering that you could think of, giving way to that sort-of transcendence at the end; by God, does Tippett make us earn it. While the visuals slope by in their horrors, the soundtrack hammers and screams and drones away, with awful sounds of babies babbling as a constant organic counterpoint to all of the metal (in one of the film's most startling image, the babbling is paired with a low-res monitor showing a composite of a live-action face, like a human baby was badly constructed by creatures that didn't know what one was supposed to look like). And behind even that, Dan Wool's soundtrack plinks away heavily, like it's being played on a rusty piano. I don't even know how a piano can be rusty, but Mad God has one anyways.
It's an extraordinary experience, exhausting and unpleasant, and it breaks my heart how few people will ever get to see it on the big screen (after a cursory tour of theaters, it ended up as an exclusive on the streaming service Shudder) - I've seen it twice now, once on an a huge film festival auditorium and once on a television, and there's not the remotest comparison to be made between the two. On TV, it was unsettling delirium; projected in a theater, it felt like being in prison, one of the damned souls myself. And that's quite an experience, even if it's not likely to be everybody's jam. Nothing about this is meant to be everybody's jam; it's too idiosyncratic and committed to its all-encompassing vision of misery. But given that explicit goal, it's an extraordinary achievement, with its animation fluidly and organically creating a dizzying slide into Hell itself that's such a truly special exercise in visionary craftsmanship that even the horrific content is made somehow inspiring.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
