For more than four decades, Phil Tippett has belonged to the narrow circle of Hollywood’s greatest experts in special effects and animation. He won an Oscar for Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park”, was nominated in the same category four more times, and was part of the team that worked with Lucas from the beginning on “Star Wars”. Nevertheless, Tippett considers this dark nihilistic dystopian combination of animated fantasy and horror to be his life’s work and has worked on “Mad God” for more than three decades. In fact, “Mad God” is a hybrid of a feature film and an animated film in which there is no clear narrative line, and if your first associations with the animated film are plays that are played during matinees for children, then you better forget about this grotesque, dark, nihilistic fantasy.
Visually, it reminded me of the videos of the American metal band “Tool”, a surreal vision of a terrifying world inhabited by some strange creatures. So at the beginning we see some strange tall figure with a gas mask on his face descending into some completely destroyed world that resembles hell. His task is the destruction of that ravaged world, which looks more like an unimaginable nightmare compared to which the depictions of hell by the Dutch Renaissance painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel look like a primary school graduation in Vodice. It’s a real Sodom and Gomorrah, and it’s from some stalker world where there are no people anymore, only some grotesque creatures live there.
Although we have countless creepy and surreal characters, the Killer from the beginning will later end up with the Surgeon or the Alchemist, and only at the end we learn that the Killer was hired by the Last Man (played by the British film rebel Alex Cox who became famous in the eighties with cult films such as “Repo Men” and “Sid and Nancy”). It is really extremely difficult to describe in words the world that we find in “Mad God” and it is a true microcosm of destruction, ruin, cruelty, immorality and chaos that can also be seen as imagining some future post-industrial world nearer and further into the future when people finally disappear from this world. planet.
