Mad God

A stop-motion animation project decades in the making, Phil Tippett's Kickstarted shorts have - finally - blossomed into a full-length feature. Far longer than the constituent parts drip-feed over the tail-end of the 2010s, this Mad God pulls apart those three previously released episodes then stitches them back together around deeper, meaner, digressions. As always, a sturdy looking fellow in a gas mask is airdropped into a Hell of scratch built rot from the skies above, tasked with making sense of a crumbling map and the relentless gnashing around him. His journey excavates dozens of extinct, and still-functional, realms; all fixated on cruelty as an industry with no clear outcome. These wanders take the gas masked assassin to the centre of this sunken creation to set a bomb that has no hope of detonating. A framing device, presented upfront, likens this trial to the Godly tantrum that toppled Babel - an affront fired from Heaven that split a united mankind into countless, warring, factions. 

Alex Cox stands in for the Judeo-Christian creator here, the Repo Man director cast as the sky-faring general compelling thousands of identikit ThreeA action figures to, monotonously, climb into a diving bell to brave automated flak guns and the swirling infernos below. Cox's character, the supremely powerful tinkerer - complete with those Howard Hughesian markers of the moldering magnate, the claw like toenail - is our sole glimpse of a humanity without any obvious physical or temporal distortions. The destiny of our species then to make endless war on our barbarous, animated, offspring: the movie monsters held in a dusted, worshipful, repose or the factory that presses (then batters) a small army of shitty lint people. Tippet's film is marvelous; a kaleidoscopic throb of unexpunged, constantly updating, imagination that deliberately works against niceties like a corporate friendly dramatic wavelength or, even, dialogue. Mad God instead centres itself around consumption and excretion, both in terms of literal on-screen action and the infernal machinery that compels the damned to stagger forward. 

GO MOTION

You've got 'til June 16th to kick in funds for Phil Tippett's experimental short MAD GOD, a stop-motion nightmare project that's laid dormant for a few decades. As well as it being super exciting to see what a master like Tippett can accomplish when he's not saddled with some boring, formalised Hollywood structure, it's also a kick to learn that Tippett is treating Mad God's production as a training exercise for his army of volunteers. He wants to pass on his expertise.

This is the sort of project that best exemplifies the appeal of Kickstarter - audiences are able to vote financially for what they want to see, giving artists who aren't getting their due elsewhere the opportunity to keep creating. That said, how depressing is it that the guy behind Dragonslayer's Vermithrax Pejorative isn't able to hustle together $40,000 through traditional means?