Phil Tippett’s Mad God opens with a passage from Leviticus. It closes with a monstrous cuckoo clock chiming the hour. In between, this stop-motion oddity features a world of dreams and nightmares highlighting a clear craftsman at work.
It’s difficult to articulate what exactly Mad God is about, the film lacking a coherent or detailed narrative in any real sense. Instead, it’s more akin to an experimental or avant-garde mood piece than it is a traditional narrative film. We follow, for a good portion of the running time, a nameless individual dressed in a steampunk version of a First World War soldier’s uniform. Following a fragile and crumbling map – X marks the spot! – the soldier journeys ever downwards through all manner of Dantean hellscapes and nightmarish visions. Faceless bodies are tormented and killed. Beasts and monsters recognisable from myth and legend oversee varieties of human experimentation, competition, factory-line torture and more. As both the soldier and the audience progress through these absurd but often hauntingly beautiful environments – rendered through miniatures, puppetry, live action set pieces and VFX – we are mostly left to draw together patterns, connections and ultimately conclusions ourselves. Without dialogue (the film’s aural component is comprised mostly of score and basic sound effects) interpretation is open to debate, but its evocative imagery and linear progression offer clear anchoring points for thematic reading and emotional investment.
A lazy comparison would point toward the gothic stop-motion work of Tim Burton and Henry Selick, but for me, Mad God recalled instead the twisted work of graphic artists including Ralph Steadman or Dave McKean, the kind of tactile materiality often found in the collage work of the latter artist being particularly prominent. There are also clear nods toward the iconography of filmmakers such as Lynch and Kubrick, with allusions to both Eraserhead and 2001: A Space Odyssey fore-fronted by Tippet at crucial junctures during the film’s slim, 80-minute runtime. For me, this is a film about humanity’s cyclical relationship with violence and conflict, played out across history and perpetrated by any number of individuals. Indeed, it presents us with multiple ‘mad gods’ – generals, doctors, scientists and others overseeing death and destruction – asking us to question who exactly is to blame for the atrocities we witness – the individuals who commit such acts, or a seemingly absent almighty who does nothing to stop such suffering?
Its imagery feels distinctly evocative of the 20th century’s industrialisation of war and violence, with iconographic allusions toward trench warfare, the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and desolation wrought by the nuclear bomb. That said, there are also jarring moments of dark (read: pitch-black) humour as well, a desire or perhaps necessity to inject the abject and nihilistic content with moments of bitter irony. Mad God is certainly not for everyone, but its sheer artistic accomplishment as a synthesis of stop-motion and animation techniques, helmed by a clearly auteurist vision in the form of Phil Tippett, will reward those with an interest in the absurd and surreal.
Notes from the Multiplex 