Mad God (2022)

[Guybrush]

Hey there!

This is a discussion thread for discussing Mad God, a movie created by stop-motion animator Phil Tippett.

Here's how I suggested it in the SCD Film Club thread:

Mad God (2022)

Stop motion animator Phil Tippett worked on this as a side-project for something like 30 years. It seems like it might be inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, bringing the viewer on a trip through hell for a look on that grotesque fantasy world, its inhabitants and the tortures inflicted on them.

Sounds good to me

Members of the SCD film club are encouraged to watch this and discuss it here, but of course anyone can tag along.

Let's go on this journey through hell together

[Janszoon]

That looks cool, I'll have to see if I can find it somewhere.

[Guybrush]

I watched it and enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'll ever watch it again, but still nice.

The setup was strangely similar to the Japanese stop motion animation junk head in which a humanoid robot is lowered down into the bowels of an urban landscape in a future dystopia. It is so similar that I wonder if they're connected. Mad God has been in production so long. May it have inspired Junk Head?

The premise starts off good, but I can't say the plot does much for me after a few minutes in. A lot of the movie is just characters travelling - the guys sent down, the nurse carrying the baby, the ghostlike character carrying the baby.

On the upside, the hellscapes and creatures are plenty and pretty gnarly. Stop motion to me generally isn't scary, but it can be disturbing (see Jan Svankmajer) so it's an interesting medium and done so well here. Tippett's imagination seems inspired at times. I especially liked the corridor with the giants getting electroshock therapy so they shit into these pipes under the chairs and.. did the poop get turned into little worker people?

For repeated viewing, I would prefer more of a story to come back to. Still well worth watching, I think, at least once.