Film / News
Oscar winner Phil Tippett’s Mad God comes to the Cube
Bringing a stop-motion animated film to Bristol might seem like a ‘coals to Newcastle’ exercise. But Oscar-winning Phil Tippett’s Mad God couldn’t be further removed from Aardman territory. Indeed, you’d have to go all the way back to 1993 and the Bolexbrothers’ The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb to find a comparably macabre feature from Bristol’s fertile stop-motion animation scene.
Something of a legend in nerd circles, Tippett’s work appeared in all three of George Lucas’s original Star Wars films. He also created the animated robot sequences in Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 RoboCop. It was while working on the 1990 follow-up RoboCop 2 that he embarked on the project that was to become Mad God. But Tippett became disillusioned after Spielberg hired him for Jurassic Park. His work on that film won him an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. But the experience convinced him that stop-motion’s days were numbered and the future belonged to CGI.
Although Mad God had been shelved, Tippett’s army of fans and acolytes wouldn’t let it go. Twenty years later, he was persuaded to dust it down for a Kickstarter campaign and to teach a new generation of animators his techniques. The COVID-19 pandemic gave him time to finish it off and the film was finally released by Shudder a couple of months ago. It gets a rare big screen outing at the Cube for two nights only on October 17 and 18.
is needed now More than ever
Just don’t go along expecting Wallace and Gromit/Shaun the Sheep-esque jollity. Mad God is a bleak, dystopian experimental science fiction fable set in a world of monsters, mad scientists and war pigs, into which The Assassin descends inside a corroded diving bell. What follows is not for the faint-hearted. But if you enjoy gory disembowelment, monster babies and torrents of excrement produced by delightfully named Shit Men, this is the lovingly-crafted, dialogue-free (unless you count some grunting by Alex Cox) nightmare for you.
Alex Cox plays the mad scientist
Critics have been impressed and repulsed, often in equal measure.
“This is undoubtedly a work of historic significance, made by a master in his field,” reckoned The Guardian, while cautioning queasily that “there’s hardly any humour in Tippett’s vision, just cruelty and a relentless squelchiness.”
We’re a long way from Wallace & Gromit . . .
“Strange and squelchy and all kinds of sick, Mad God comes at you with nauseating energy, its flood of dystopian images both playful and repulsive,” enthused the New York Times. “This is a work of a genuine visionary, and has all the makings of an instant cult classic,” agreed Sight and Sound.
Tickets for the Cube’s screenings are available here. Make sure you go on an empty stomach.
All images: Shudder
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