The Diorama of a Dark Life: A review of the animated film "Mad God"
A clotting hell and a mechanical nightmare, renowned special effects artist Phil Tippett spent 30 years creating the creepiest cartoon of your life.
Totalitarian Future. A soldier in a World War I-like chemical defense suit descends in a rusty diving bell into an infernal underworld. His goals to the end seem vague-we understand, however, that the hero must go through a whole parade of nauseating hell and detonate a bomb. A heap of bestiary is encountered along the way: ugly creatures munching everything on the go, bubbling and streaming with vomitous juices - this new Tartarus pulses in a rapture of death. Chains of workers also go to the slaughter: crushed by steam-roller, flattened by granite slabs, or melted in a hellish funnel. This is what the post-nuclear world looks like, reduced to the point of extreme oxidation, with rusty metal, single-celled cells, and laboratories for horrific vivisections.
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Creative genius has not always sought to reflect only the beautiful; it has often been driven by vague, agonized notions of the destruction of the world, human suffering and pain. Thus art expressed the urge for architectural designs of hell - through Virgil's epic, Dante's nine circles or Bosch's religious paintings. Now to these architects of the terrible we can safely add the name of Phil Tippett - the creator of Mad God, who spent thirty years poring over this megalomaniac project. Tippett is a notorious and not at all unlike a reclusive marginalist: Tippett is a prominent special effects supervisor with a hand in such blockbusters as Jurassic Park, Star Wars and RoboCop. Hollywood's most exuberant fantasies, from anatomically plausible dinosaurs to heavily armed robots, are a credit to the 70-year-old master of frame-by-frame animation.
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Tippett built his sci-fi diorama long and painfully, having had time to read tons of literature (Jung, the Bible, and Milton are in the front row), think through the world's ecosystem, and even lie in a mental institution - the head breaks quickly when an artist or scientist is eager to push his limits. In 1990, after working on the second Robocop, Tippett began building his own hell - and finished in the new century, when a Kickstarter campaign gave him the funds and a team of enthusiasts who didn't mind working in the old frame-by-frame animation technique and finally completing the project.
"Mad God" is a plotless morass, a combination of afterlife wandering and nightmare logic. The story, the descent of an unknown agent exploring the chthonic solids, is given only as a pretext. Tippett relies on techniques of perception -- he is primarily concerned with the immersive experience, so "Mad God" walks the viewer through a local Tartarus. A man-made butchery populated by nauseating biota and industrial machinery flutters on the screen. Chimneys and factories clatter, clumps of life metamorphose, and the ecosystem of the underworld looks like an assemblage of feces. Tippett was inspired by everyone he could without denying aesthetic continuity: from the industrial textures of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to celluloid exploitation. From the necrorealism of Hans R. Giger to the decadent painting of Zdislaw Beksinski and The Terminator. Tanks converge in an apocalyptic duel, and stakes adorn skulls covered in cobwebs.
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Tippett models and produces the nightmarish, giving form to what even Lovecraft's grim syllable would pass over in describing the indescribable. Epithets and verbal articulations yield to a cascade of images-it is no coincidence that "The Mad God" is without words, accompanied only by a monotonous hum. For a foretaste and orientation, the Bible fragment from the Book of Leviticus describes God's wrath: the desolation of lands and cities for disobeying the Almighty. It is through this leitmotif that Tippett drags the entire visual infernalism: the nuclear mushroom unleashing the earth, the bitter errors of peacebuilding - death and destruction come where the seed of life was sown. The idyll of unicellulars explodes with a duplicate of self-destruction. Life and death are double-edged concepts that deny themselves. Tippett's ubiquitous materialism is striking - with him we touch the textures of the corporeal, a terrarium of deformed varieties of proto-life that exist in an endless cycle. This is what the clay figures, painstakingly crafted and set in motion by Tippett, are for - they are needed not for the grotesque, but as a medium. Through man-made images, the very dynamics of swarming life are captured, frame by frame and in the smallest detail.
"Mad God" is a nightmarish vision where the religious picture of destruction borders on the author's insanity. An hour and a half of violent cycles, senseless dismemberment and the crawling of the living, Tippett shows perfectly what would have happened if Terrence Malick had been on the side of dark vitalism. And what the work of Dante Alighieri might have been if it had had a budget of a couple of million dollars, a set of puppets, and a small animation shop. Not just a cartoon, but a swan song of frame-by-frame animation, albeit performed on marginal fields of aesthetics - in the categories of the absolutely ugly.
This article was sponsored by Marco Brambilla
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