Mad God (2021) — Movie Review

I write reviews based on four categories: Coherence, Intensity of Effect, Complexity, and Originality, each based on a score of 1 to 5. The total score is averaged out of these parts.

Mad God is a still animation movie released on June 16th 2022 to Shudder and directed by Phil Tippet. Compiled over a period of thirty years, it is a shining example, the flagship piece of stop-motion that others can look to for its wide breadth of art design, its depth in its visual density, and its ability to originally critique and uplift the artistic medium it showcases. Hopefully in this video I can explain why. There are spoilers ahead, you have been warned.

First let’s start with a conventional review. I’m going to use four categories to discuss movies, now and into the future. These categories are coherence, intensity of effect, complexity, and originality, all of which I found through reading Film Art: An Introduction, 12th edition. It felt reasonable to review Mad God in this way so one can see the usefulness, as well as the limitations, of this rubric system, as I review more films in the future.

Mad God is a relatively incoherent film, where we have a semblance of a story, though there is barely any plot. There are beings, soldiers or assassins, who plunge the depth of a strange and maligned world, taking with them briefcases containing bombs that hardly, if ever, explode. That is because, through the cruel logic of chance, these bombs either malfunction, or our hero is stopped before reaching their destination. We are privy to several other “set pieces” which describe the world through memories and flashback, but also through the functioning of the world and how it goes about renewing itself. Many of our “characters” are either instruments of renewing this world, or are observers of it. Through this, though we are able to come to terms with how the world of Mad God is so messed up, we are unable ever to rest comfortably. This incoherence of the movie may have been intentional, or was a necessary lapse, given the three decades long development by Phil Tippet of a simple story told in a complex way, thus inviting plenty of opportunities for amendments to the original design. Which means that, given that a narrative or logical coherence was not an emphasis, a 2 out of 5 for this category would be well set.

Let’s talk about intensity of effect. Mad God is a thoroughly arresting feature. It opens with verses from the book of Leviticus, which the Judeo-Christian religion share from either the Torah or the Old Testament. In it, we are confronted with a God who is so Mad as to consider abandonment as a punishment. From here, the many avenues of suffering are taken to their furthest possible extent. We have a total abnegation of law and order, as those who live civilian lives are taken advantage of, are eaten and stepped on, or used for resources for a massive machine that continuously needs organic material, but will not explain why. Further down, we encounter horrific creatures who consume the remains, sometimes flesh, sometimes excrement, of others. Further down there are wars, fought with massive tanks across wastelands that have been glassed by nuclear holocaust. As our soldiers navigate these unholy lands, we are forced constantly to flitter between those familiar objects and totally alien circumstances layered on top of each other simultaneously into one amalgamated metaphor. While the movie lacks a narrative substance, it manages still to convey horror, disgust, and despair, using stop-motion technology. There are moments when the movie repeats this thematic horror ad nauseum, where a set piece lingers for too long, and does so without stop-motion, lending to the feeling that Phil Tippet ran out of time or energy to make it completely stop-motion, or was simply hoping to pad the runtime to make it closer to feature length. This may not have been true, it was just a feeling. Yet still greater care could have been made to continue towards variety rather than repetition. This is a minor nitpick, and we can rest comfortably with intensity of effect at a 4 out of 5.

When discussing complexity, we must concede the fact that many movies do not have the composition in their entirety as Mad God does in a single minute of its runtime. The visual complexity is jaw dropping. There is not only an incredible visual complexity, but there will likely be a temporal one as well, as like that of other stop-motion features like Fantastic Mr. Fox, there is something wonderfully universal about stop-motion that will hopefully stand the test of time.

The complexity of the experience comes from Phil Tippet’s ability not just to design and utilize stop-motion, but there are also filmic influences from other abstract works like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or from the creation montage of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. Several moments of the film truly boggled my mind for the way they managed to create a sense of scale and distance, as many of the sets give the appearance that they take place across miles. If there was any counterargument to the egregious use of CGI in our time as a way to attempt “realism” at cost, Mad God would be it. The sort of imagination on display is one that is simultaneously disturbing and magnetizing. It is undeniable that, as one watches for the first time, there is a desire to own a copy of Mad God so that one may stop at each frame, and that many of these frames could be scanned and printed as film posters advertising the movie itself. For a movie with such post-apocalyptic leanings, it could not have been imagined in any other way. Cities have cars piled alongside completely dessicated streets and buildings. There stand too altars of worship for polytheistic gods long gone in the minds of their believers. Electronic and mechanical devices malfunction and sputter. Stairways and causeways seem to leak with fluids from who knows what. Lighting, from either sets or characters, imply that there is much more latent behind the darkness. There is an ambience that does not end. Its resonance, as it lingers long after the film’s end, is what gives it a 5 out of 5.

Its originality is the particular facet of this rubric that I would like to spend most of my thoughts in this video. It was not enough for Phil Tippet to resort to stop-motion, but to use it as a way to speak in tribute both towards stop-motion and to rebuke it, is what I think makes this film one to remember and rewatch. In Mad God, the premise is twofold: if God exists, we have to concede that it is an entity not totally on our side, either out of some implicit benign avoidance, or through sheer vindictive malice. The world on display is strangely not unlike that of our own. Ordinary people are consumed for the purposes of either economy or culture. Workplace accidents are met with shrugs. People willingly sacrifice themselves for what they believe to be a “cause,” which also especially occurs under religious belief. If God exists, we have to say that the spiritual element of what moves us, what the engine is that keeps us going, is one of obvious and horrific outcomes.

Supposing there is no God, and we live in a truly physicalist, materialist universe, the answer of Mad God as a film is no less bleak. Here we can see that the transmutation of matter is taking place among living entities in much the same way the universe handles its other elements. That we as living beings inhabit a vast minority of the universe does not make us special. No, it only reminds us of the arbitrary nature and chance of the universe that, every so often, produces life when the conditions are right. Many of the set-pieces of Mad God prove that we have taken this massive opportunity of life and we have squandered it for pursuits that attempt to remind us that there is something beyond us, spiritual or cultural, that calls for our bodies. Wars, industry, even the pleasure of playing with lesser creatures. Humanity holds within it a litany of experiences, which we call history. Stephen Dedalus says as much in Ulysses that history is a nightmare that he is trying to wake up from. That famous phrase is the epigraph of Mad God, where all history is rested upon its world simultaneously. It is shocking, but when each moment forces its comparison upon the viewer to our world, unfortunately all too relatable.

Phil Tippet, in one reading of the film, IS the Mad God. He fumbles and fixes these creatures to their ends, where they do not really know what is in store, yet they assume that their actions are of their own free will. Yet, as we know, Phil Tippet is a flesh and blood creature as well. To us, and to the fictional characters of Mad God, this is no consolation, yet one can hardly think of a stop-motion project that takes the idea of the creator and embeds it into the project. Fantastic Mr. Fox does not use its world to wonder at the masters who make them move. And neither does the arrival of a child usher in a sacrifice that causes such cataclysmic changes like it does in Tippet’s work. Though Mad God luxuriates in a lack of narrative uniformity, it does harken to religious and mythological themes and iconography. Phil Tippet is simultaneously invisible and yet the causal element of every moment, and this is part and parcel of what we mean when we suggest a Mad God. This is the kind of reading that leans towards, as we have mentioned before, Dante’s Divine Comedy, but also perhaps Milton’s Paradise Lost, in the struggles of Satan towards his relation to Christ, the Son of God. This is the reading that Descartes mentions when devising his cogito, that Cervantes references his Don Quixote, or that perhaps of Shakespeare, where the limits of reason begin to resemble madness.

A diametrically opposed reading of the film is that of the materialist one, where many of the characters are of course puppets, and it is because of the fact that they fundamentally respond to certain physical laws that happens to make them of use, of utility, to whatever these overlords desire of them. Unlike perhaps the digital medium, it is this physical realm of stop-motion that takes up space, that lingers for eons, amid the piled layers of civilizations that we see before us. Those layers, whether they be history as metaphor, or a literal sequence of hells like that of Dante’s Divine Comdey, we are no less aware that this physical realm is nowhere near what the digital realm has today, where bits of information are stored on hard drives that, though they can pile bits for display on a two-dimensional image, flattens it all for perusal. The digital sphere may be more user-friendly, but it too comes at a cost. Phil Tippet is perhaps expressing a certain admission of defeat of stop-motion with Mad God. Look upon ye at the culmination of our physicality. Maps that our journeyman hold fall apart. Cities lie abandoned. Soldiers stand in line waiting to take their turn, with no awareness of what happened to the ones who went before. Bombs that should have had purpose malfunction easily, ticking seemingly without end. Nuclear radiation deforms animals into monsters. The young are slaughtered so as to keep the machine of time moving forward. And the speaker who desires this destruction has the voice of an infant. None of this is ideal, but in the physical medium, all we have is habit. While the digital sphere can reconstitute itself easily, where 0s and 1s have methods of change that feel relatively easier, it is this physical realm where forces have to be applied, that of heat and cold, pressure and time, in order to turn one thing into another. And in some cases, this is met with resistance. And so force or coercion are applied. In this reading, there is no Mad God at all. The resulting fictions are the physical world’s attempt at teleology. What the purpose of all this is is hidden from the ordinary being’s mind. For it is not called upon to know, it is only called upon to survive and endure. This horror of the physical realm reminds us perhaps of Melville’s Moby-Dick, or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It speaks to those who came after modernity, that of Marx, Nietschze, and Freud, who approached conscious behavior with a degree of skepticism.

Unlike other stop-motion animated features, it is this questioning throughout the film by almost purely visuals alone that is so arresting. The medium itself is not taken for granted, and is used in such a way as to both admire and admonish what Phil Tippet has spent his whole life mastering. It is because of this that it receives an originality rating of 5 out of 5.

Averaged together, these ratings equal a solid 4.0 out of 5, but I hope you can see that there is something about Mad God greater than the some of its parts. That is what makes the categories I am using here not equally weighted. Originality, in my book, will overpower coherence. And at times complexity can override an intensity of effect. While I intend to use these categories in future movie reviews, hopefully you can see the arbitrariness of the scores, which hopefully give you a more informed judgment on whether it is a movie you should see.

One of the hopes I have for Mad God is that we eventually see a wide physical blu ray release. Many of the downsides of streaming do not do this movie justice. Many of the darker scenes have crushed black levels, and the artifacting of any detail makes this less than an ideal experience. A blu ray release would hopefully alleviate these two problems. This review is an attempt to get the word out in any way possible, thus making a physical release more likely, while also discussing why I enjoyed the film despite its shortcomings.