Intro: Mad God @ Princeton Garden Theater

I was invited by the Princeton Garden Theater to introduce a screening of one of my favorite animated films, Phil Tippett's Mad God. I thought I would share my remarks in case you wanted emulate the experience, watching the film on Shudder. Just make sure you picture me hopping from one foot to the other anxiously, in a Shigeru Mizuki Kitaro t-shirt, speaking into a microphone.

Hit me up for your animation-related speaking engagement, have words will travel ??

DELIVERED AT THE PRINCETON GARDEN THEATER APRIL 26, 2024

Director Phil Tippett began photography on what would become the feature film Mad God in the closing years the 1980s, but the images of Mad God had been percolating in Tippitt’s sketchbook since he was a ten-year-old kid in Berkley California discovering the grotesque hellscapes of 15th century painter Hieronymus Bosch. Already obsessed with the stop-motion movie monsters of Ray Harryhausen a, potent brew began to ferment in the young artist’s mind.??

Back to 1988, Phil shot the first six minutes of these ideas, a short film to be titled Mad God, with the help of the effects crew that had just wrapped on Robocop 2.

Fun fact, Robocop 2 was the only movie my parents ever walked out of, shocked by its ultraviolence.

It was also Tippett’s second collaboration with director Irvin Kershner. During his time at Industrial Light and Magic, Tippett had animated key scenes of Kershner’s The Empire Strikes – including the dramatic AT-AT robotic walkers. The Lucasfilm people kept calling, and Hollywood checks for robot effects were happily cashed as Tippett Studios grew and expanded into the new world of digital effects. But Tippett’s Mad God had begun, and was destined to be anything but robotic.??

Thirty years, and three croundfunding rounds later, Mad God is a feature film, a Boscherian nightmare, a deeply human film, built painstakingly, frame by frame, with human hands, a “transgressive infantile mythos” as Tippett himself puts it, its narrative shape inspired by the origin myths that human cultures tell about themselves.

If I were to guess, one storyteller to another, Mad God’s non-Euclidian shape is a reaction to the Lucasfilm-type projects his studio was built on. Tippett’s story rejects the Hero’s Journey, by then storytelling dogma in Hollywood. There are no heroes in Mad God, but there is a journey. It’s a downward journey, dropping in a diving bell toward the pitch-black bottom of civilization’s trench.???

When making the famous diving bell sequence in Mad God, which you will shortly see, Phil kept pushing to make it longer, as captured by this exchange recounted in the excellent Tippett biography Mad Dreams and Monsters . Here, Tippet reviews the work-in-progress sequence with cinematographer Chris Morley, and animator Tom Gibbons:?

Gibbons: “Where the camera goes down and down, and down, do we keep it that long?”??

Morley: “We will probably trim this down, especially the shot on the dinosaur bones. But Phil likes that.”??

Tippett: “I want to play everything long. We just want to stay connected to the guy.”??

Morley: “We can still play it long, but some of the shots are repetitive, because I know how we shot it. Most of it was locked off, and we created a camera move in post.”??

Tippett: “We could play with dissolves. Anything that we can do to make it appear longer is fine for me. It must take forever to get down there. I want to push it as close to making people walk out of the room in boredom as possible.”?

From Tippet’s perspective, he’s not confronting the audience with violence, as with my parent’s ill-fated date with Robocop 2, but instead the discomfort of being locked in a sequence with a character for longer than the contemporary contract between viewer and picture allows.??

Despite Tippet’s edit-room goal, I don’t think there’s any risk of boredom here.

This is a rare opportunity to see this film in the theater. Mad God was released on Shudder in 2021, over thirty years after production began. During that time many, many artists and animators contributed to the film, including volunteers who would come to set on the weekends and work for nothing but the opportunity to join in on Phil Tippett’s mad dream.

Many of those artists spoke of the collaborative way the production worked; if the film is a singular vision, that vision was never held so tightly that artist couldn’t leave their mark and grow with the project.??

The film’s composer, Dan Wool, gave this example:??

“I learned early that Phil’s style of directing is to stay out of the way of the creatives he’s chosen and trusts. He deliberately set up an environment, a framework, that allowed for—and almost demanded—maximum creative expansion from everyone involved. For whatever reason, that first (score) demo earned me access to that framework. I remember once Phil gently shushing someone in the production when they voiced a small suggestion about what the music for one of the scenes could be, saying, ‘No direction.’”?

“Maximum Creative Expansion” with thirty years application. I invite you now to enjoy the result. This is Phil Tippitt’s Mad God.??