Fantastic Fest: Behold! The Mad God, Phil Tippett

Stop motion animation makes gods of humans. For what is divinity, except breathing life into the inanimate? The art has its pantheon. Willis O'Brien, the man who made King Kong roar; Karel Zeman, who fused stop motion and live action footage; Czech nightmare-maker Jan vankmajer; monster master Ray Harryhausen; and Phil Tippett. The man that made Luke Skywalker fly through the legs of an AT-AT and brought mechanical injustice to Detroit in Robocop, before applying his understanding of motion to computers to make dinosaurs walk in Jurassic Park. But now he has stirred a Mad God, his stop motion epic of darkness and monsters that evokes experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage as much as the legacy of moviemaking one incremental action at a time.

Mad God, which receives its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest, is the subject of legend in itself: Tippett's mysterious and bizarre project, so dark and innovative that no studio would come near it. In animation circles, it held the same mythic place as Richard Williams' The Thief and the Cobbler, which was left unfinished by Williams' death, and so it was only released in bastardized, incomplete forms. Yet Tippett has finally seen his vision completed after decades of occasional work, sometimes in massive bursts. The origins stretch back to the 1980s, when he started and then abandoned the project. After two decades on the shelf, Tippett started to give it what he called "an update," and finally in 2012 he showed the footage to editor Jim Robinson. "He was surprised how much it held up to the tone and locations of the characters."

With this new momentum, Tippett gave himself a deadline: The film had to be ready for the 2021 Locarno Film Festival, where Mad God debuted this August. Fortunately, he'd completed the actual stop motion phase just before the pandemic sent the whole film industry into lockdown, "and then it was pretty much compositing and color grading and finishing up the music." However, it's still a living, breathing entity. Tippett nodded at mention of George Lucas' line about how films are never finished, they're only abandoned. Even since Locarno, and its North American premiere at Fantasia Film Festival in Canada, "we've updated the color grading, and Richard Beggs will never be done with the sound until we get a distributor."

There's an image – in part stemming from industry legend Ray Harryhausen – that stop motion artists work alone. Tippett, who is bipolar, credited his manic side with giving him the momentum to keep the film on track, and even dubbed it "my superpower. ... I'll work on something until I drop. Well," he clarified, "I would. I won't anymore."

Still, Tippett described Mad God as a massive collaborative endeavor. It was artists at Tippett Studios, craving to work with physical puppets instead of CG creations, who inspired the update. "People just tended to gravitate toward it," Tippett added. "I would give talks around the Bay Area, and people volunteered. ... Sometimes at the weekend I'd get between 15 and 25 people that were non-skilled, from colleges and high schools and wherever else." The film would have been impossible without that help: One of the sets "took about three years to do, with between four and six people working on gluing thousands and thousands of melted soldiers on to these hill shapes."

Yet Mad God is still deeply personal, driven by the director's creative vision which he described as springing from "a lifetime of ideas and memories that are just circulating." Take the enigmatic opening scene, in which the viewer first sees a figure known only as the Assassin descend through a Dantean nightmare. Tippett recalled, "I was in college, barely out of high school, and I did a set-up that I never shot of a diving bell going into a chasm, but it was square."

Like the art of stop motion, which was preemptively declared dead when CGI came along, Tippett's creative process has proved that patience isn't just a virtue: it's essential. "Everything is cyclical. Everything comes back around. All you have to do is wait."

Mad God screens on Wednesday, Sept. 29 at 9:20pm at the Alamo South Lamar, and is available on FF@HOME Sept. 30-Oct. 11.