Mad God trailer comes straight out of a TOOL music video
Phil Tippett is a master in practical effects, miniatures, stop-motion, and a slew of movie tricks, secrets, and behind-the-scenes magic. With that in mind, it comes as no surprise to learn that he’s had a “opus” that’s been coming to a boil for the last thirty years. His upcoming movie, Mad God, got its first trailer recently, and it’s a wild ride.
Check out the trailer for Mad God below:
It’s hard not to make immediate comparisons to music videos for songs like “Sober” or “Parabola” from the band TOOL’s earlier albums. The dark and unsettling aesthetic is on full display, and Tippett Studio has done a wonderful job of getting under our skin in the Mad God trailer.
Mad God is a project that Tippett started and then shelved way back in the early 1990s. Why? Because Tippett was convinced the CGI in Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, a movie for which Tippett created early stop-motion scenes, would mean the end a stop-motion era.
The rest is history, to a point.
Here’s what Mad God’s official movie website has to say about the project:
Mad God is a fully practical stop-motion film set in a Miltonesque world of monsters, mad scientists, and war pigs.
In 1987, legendary visual effects and stop-motion craftsman Phil Tippett embarked upon an ambitious personal project, fabricating and animating a darkly surreal world in which the creatures and nightmares of his imagination could roam free. Phil produced dozens of environments and hundreds of puppets for the project, filling notebook after notebook with thousands of detailed sketches and storyboards.
Decades after the success of Tippett Studio forced production into stasis, a group of animators at Tippett Studio came upon boxes of shelved props and puppets. After viewing the original footage, they convinced Phil to resurrect the project. The small group began volunteering their weekends to Mad God, and before long it had snowballed into a crew of more than 60 artists. A wildly successful KickStarter campaign provided funding for materials and equipment.
Each piece of Mad God is hand crafted, independent and created from the heart. Sometimes that heart is bursting with love for the craft, while other times it’s macabre, punctured, and bleeding. Mad God is a mature film crafted from techniques & technologies that span the history of cinema and the career of a true animation mastermind.
The first chapters of Mad God were unleashed on the world via Kickstarter campaigns.
Starting in August, 2021 – Mad God debuts as a Feature Film, combining the earlier chapters and adding 30+ additional minutes of content to fulfill Phil Tippett’s 30-year vision.
But there’s more to the madness. Tippett recently talked with Variety about Mad God, and he made it clear the movie is less a conventional story and more an unraveling of his mind.
It doesn’t adhere to the normal structures of narrative. It’s driven much more by my unconscious than it is by any conventional filmmaking that has a three-act structure to it. Years ago, I shot about six minutes of footage, way back in the late ’80s. I had to archive it because it was just too big for me, the scope was too big, I didn’t have enough people, so I kind of canned it, but never forgot about it…
…I went down this psychological path that took me into this bizarre world that ended up in the psych ward. It was that kind of experience where I guess I became a method filmmaker, I got lost in this unconscious vision.
Mad God premiered at the Locarno Film Festival earlier this month, but there’s not word yet about a wider release.
