Other animated film presented at the Strange Festival as FEFFS, Mad God has not gone unnoticed. While Takahide Hori worked almost 11 years alone in his studio to accomplish Junk Head, Mad God is another ambitious project, but this time collective. Started more than thirty years ago, this feature film comes back from afar. On the stand, Phil Tippett, particularly known for his work on the special effects of such cult licenses as Robocop, trilogy Star Wars or Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers.
Criticism of Mad God
With a pedigree like that, it's as good to say that Phil Tippett leaves with a certain advantage. Awarded at the Strange Festival by the public prize, this nightmare is a dive into hell, a personal project that has been able to cross ages and techniques through its turbulent genesis. Stopped, repulsed, threatened for budgetary issues, this feature film in stop-motion had all the fantasy... Until this beautiful day of 2021 when I was able to see Hell!
Chaotic genesis
In an interview with the media Boston Hassle, Phil Tippett tells how much movies King Kong and The Seventh Travel of Sinbad I had marked small. From the age of ten and while his father was an artist, Phil Tippett began to draw monsters, painted and sculpted, inspired by the paintings of Bruegel and Bosch. It is also influenced by the directors Karel Zeman, Jan Svankmajer and Vadislav Starevich. On the American side, it was also the comics of the 1930s-1940s that probably participated in the imagination of the young Phil. Little by little, germ in him the evanescent idea of one day making an animation film based on these universes, where the themes of the Hereafter, hell and his damned ones would prevail. The Concept Art and preparatory plates below already bear witness to the artist's fruitful imagination.
It was only in 2021 that Mad God will be finalized. If the director has worked in recent years with modern techniques such as CGI, he has never stopped his research to Mad God reading books of Art, Paleontology and Archaeology. In 1987, Phil was surpassed by his own ambition, while the synthetic images announced the digital age. His colleagues then encouraged him to take over the project twenty years later and it was after having launched a Kickstarter In 2013, Phil Tippett raised $124,156 with donations from 2523 contributors.
The team is made up of passionate volunteers of this golden age, where the special effects were performed second by second, at the price of a damned work. The facilitators Chuck Duke and Tom Gibbonsthe composer Dan Wool and sound designer Richards Beggs are closely involved and the aborted project restarts more beautiful. In the same interview, Phil Tippett had fun telling how Milos Forman (directorAmadeus and friend of his partner who worked with him) encouraged him not to rush his project, when he only began his career:
« As a young filmmaker, I would ask him for advice, and his advice was some of the best I ever got: If you want to take a good shit, you have to eat well. »
An Ariane thread in a nightmare maze
A veritable maze of strange scenery, the work of Phil Tippett is full of details like the paintings of Brueghel and Bosh from which he is inspired. The director plays with the effects of depth and each scene is a superimposition of plans and materials. The scrolling is sometimes vertical, sometimes horizontal and sometimes it feels like you're seeing a scrolling video game. Some models also recall the series Little Nightmares. All the richness of his work also derives from the materials used, filters and techniques combined. Sometimes filmed in 35 mm, the film immediately turns digital. Phil also integrates real actors into puppets. A silent film that sometimes recalls German expressionism by its radicality, Mad God However, it is not avarous to grunts, cries and supplications.
In this mortuary ride, where something happens systematically on several superimposed planes, a character with the appearance straight out of a Nazi battalion of Wolfenstein descends deeper and deeper, impassive in front of the horrors he attends. On this, the film is not avarous to hemoglobin and body fluids. Giants that get electrocuted at the chain generate torrents of shit, themselves ingurgted by disgusting creatures below. Dismemberments and vivisection generate their lot of equally vomiting noises. Still mutic, the film generates an oppressive atmosphere and a reinvented universe at each stage. Mad God is a horror treat, an animated film as you have never seen.
The illusion is organic, to light years of smooth and soulless digital special effects. Just like the Animatronics of the Jurassic Park more credible than the synthetic images of his ersatz Jurassic World, or the growing forests of Dark Crystal other than those ofAvatar, Mad God Get out of life like no other modern movie. Phil himself refers to Robert Ebert, critic of the Chicago Sun-Times to explain how stop motion comes from the guts. Mad God, it's a little this phrase, a job of passion, an ode to craftsmanship, a paradox at the border of reality:
« Computer graphics looks real but feel fake, and stop motion looks fake but feel real. »
[...] closer to the recent masterpiece by Phil Tippett (just released in a boxet by Carlotta) Mad God, or even more so by his themes by terrifying Shinamarink (or The House, always the best [...]
[...] Self-taught artists such as Takahide Hori (Junkhead), pioneers such as Phil Tippett (Mad God) or tortured artists like Robert Morgan, to whom we probably owe the shorts [...]
[…] Ego et Blaze n’ont pas eu ce privilège malgré le nombre de titres raflés. Certains comme Mad God, vu en avant-première en 2021, ne sortiront qu’en 2023, la faute sans doute à un […]