‘You shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters…’
Stop-motion is already weird, isn’t it? It’s uncanny. It’s an approximation of real life that somehow feels both accurate and grotesque. Luckily, most of it is aimed at children, so it tends to stay just the right side of nightmarish. Mad God is categorically not for children. I’m not sure who it is for, really. People in the grip of mental illness, perhaps? People who have been cast out of society and have to survive in a Mad Max-esque wilderness? It’s difficult to say. Either way, it’s impressive…
If you’ve come here looking for a plot, I’m afraid I can’t help you. The best I can offer is this: A man dressed in a gas mask and shroud descends into an insidious hellscape where he meets some of the most terrifying animated creatures ever committed to film.
Director Phil Tippett is best known as a legendary visual effects supervisor, having worked on everything from The Empire Strikes Back to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to Jurassic Park. Mad God is a project that he started in 1990 whilst providing animation for RoboCop 2, before shelving it for decades after deciding that stop-motion was a dying art form. Encouraged by the members of his studio, he returned to the film in 2010 and with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and numerous volunteers, Mad God was finally screened at the London Film Festival in 2021, before being acquired by Shudder for distribution. All that is to say that it is clear in every frame that this film is a labour of love. The sheer manpower that went into the creation of the puppets that inhabit the strange world depicted in the film is both inspirational and the end result is incredibly disturbing (but somehow also darkly comic at times).
Mad God is the kind of film that will never have mass appeal, but fans of stop-motion and dark narratives will no doubt revel in having a whole new world to explore. Sure, it might not have much of a narrative, but the visuals are so arresting, so abnormal that the lack of a conventional narrative doesn’t really matter.
