Phil Tippett, a visual effects pioneer who worked on Star Wars: A New Hope, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Starship Troopers, and more, has a stop-motion sci-fi horror movie on the way, and it looks amazing. Titled Mad God, Tippett first had the idea for the film while working on Robocop 2. But when Jurassic Park came along, Tippett put work on Mad God on hold – and never really got back to it. Until the pandemic came along, that is. Tippett used the quarantine to complete Mad God, and you can watch an exciting, scary trailer for the film below.

Mad God Trailer

God damn, this looks incredible. And weird. And scary. Phil Tippett, a legend in the special effects world, started working on a stop-motion movie back in the 1990s. After work had begun on the film, Tippett started working on Jurassic Park. Originally, Steven Spielberg wanted Tippett to create stop-motion dinosaurs for his big blockbuster – but then CGI came along and changed Spielberg’s mind. This jump from stop-motion to digital convinced Tippett that the days of stop-motion work were on the way out and he decided to give up on Mad God.

However, as the official press notes tell us:

“Some 20 years later, while cleaning out the back storage areas of Tippett Studio’s Berkeley stages, several of his key artists and supervisors stumbled across original puppets and sets from those early shots. Revisiting the original footage and models, this new generation of artists, trained primarily on computers, longed to learn from Phil and assist as he revived his long-since abandoned film. Together with a volunteer crew, Phil taught a new generation of artists and craftspeople as they brought his labor of love to life.”

In 2020, with the pandemic in full swing and people quarantining at home, Tippett decided to finally finish Mad God, creating a feature-length “experimental mostly-animated adult-oriented” film.

Monsters and War Pigs

So what the hell is Mad God about? This trailer, while visually jaw-dropping, doesn’t tell us much, other than the fact that this looks like a feature-length Tool music video. There’s no real synopsis to speak of, but notes tell us that Mad God “invites its viewers not so much as to watch a story unfold as to be transported from their world to another world entirely – one of monsters and war pigs – where traditional narrative structures are mere suggestions, and the world we live in can be viewed as if through the lens of Hieronymous Bosch crossed with Buster Keaton.”

The film will have its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival on August 5, and we’ll hopefully learn more about it after that.

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