Over the weekend, a teaser for a wild-looking animated movie kept popping up on my radar. Created by visual effects and stop-motion maestro Phil Tippett (Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers, RoboCop), Mad God immediately caught my attention, thanks to the stunningly animated and surreally creepy designs and characters.

Today, I received a press release with more info on the project so I felt as if I should share the weirdness with the world. Check out the teaser and information below.

Mad God — Details

Phil Tippett had the idea for MAD GOD during a lull in his schedule after RoboCop 2. After sketching and designing a few creatures and sets, he and his stage and stop motion team at Tippett Studio shot the first few scenes of MAD GOD, including the shot of the Beast strapped to a table and a tracking shot of the Shit Men walking through a desiccated subterranean city.

When he received the call to supervise the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, Phil suspended work on the project. Jurassic Park proved to be a watershed moment in the evolution of visual effects. With a shift from handmade visual effects, the likes of which Tippett was best known for, to computer generated graphics and imagery (CGI), Phil saw the writing on the wall and thought the kind of work he was doing with MAD GOD had gone extinct overnight.

Some 20 years later, while cleaning out the back storage areas of Tippett Studio's Berkeley stages, several of his key artists and supervisors stumbled across original puppets and sets from those early shots. Revisiting the original footage and models, this new generation of artists, trained primarily on computers, longed to learn from Phil and assist as he revived his long-since abandoned film. Together with a volunteer crew, Phil taught a new generation of artists and craftspeople as they brought his labor of love to life.

In 2020, while the world sheltered through a global pandemic, Phil continued, alone, and completed the final scenes of what is now a complete, feature length experimental mostly-animated adult-oriented cinematic masterpiece. MAD GOD invites its viewers not so much as to watch a story unfold as to be transported from their world to another world entirely - one of monsters and war pigs - where traditional narrative structures are mere suggestions, and the world we live in can be viewed as if through the lens of Hieronymous Bosch crossed with Buster Keaton.

Phil Tippett — Bio

Founder of Tippett Studios, Phil Tippett is a pioneer in the Animation and Visual Effects Industry, his creations inspiring generations of filmgoers and filmmakers. His career in visual effects has spanned over 45 years and includes two Academy Awards®, six nominations, one BAFTA award, two Emmys, and the prestigious Winsor McCay and Georges Méliès awards.

In 1975, George Lucas enlisted Phil to create a stop-motion miniature chess scene for Star Wars: A New Hope. By 1978 Phil was leading the animation team at Industrial Light and Magic as they created such iconic characters as the Tauntauns and the Imperial Walkers for The Empire Strikes Back.

Tippett's career covers nearly every major milestone in modern visual effects history, from the now iconic creatures in Star Wars, to the revolutionary marriage of computer technology with stop motion (an invention he termed "go-motion") on films such as RoboCop, to the Academy Award winning dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and the giant swarming insects in Starship Troopers. Additional visual effects work includes Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984), Willow (Ron Howard, 1988), and The Haunting (Jan de Bont, 1999).