Teaser Trailer for Phil Tippett’s Animated Feature ‘MAD GOD’

Check out the brand new teaser trailer for Phil Tippett’s animated feature MAD GOD, premiering at Locarno Film Festival on August 5 as well as on August 22 at Fantasia International Film Festival. Check out details about the director and his new film MAD GOD down below.

Phil is also the recipient of this year’s Vision Award Ticinomoda at Locarno, joining past recipients such as Douglas Trumbull and Walter Murch. He’s a remarkable talent in special effects (going all the way back to Star Wars and the early ILM days). Phil’s studio is currently doing special effects for The Mandalorian.

This film has been in the making for 30 years – Phil took a break on production to work on the original Jurassic Park, and then once the pandemic hit he brought in a new team to help him complete the feature-length film. It’s truly remarkable and the trailer speaks for itself. Phil Tippett had the idea for MAD GOD during a lull in his schedule after Robocop 2. After sketching and designing a few creatures and sets, he and his stage and stop motion team at Tippett Studio shot the first few scenes of MAD GOD, including the shot of the Beast strapped to a table and a tracking shot of the Shit Men walking through a desiccated subterranean city.

When he received the call to supervise the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, Phil suspended work on the project. Jurassic Park proved to be a watershed moment in the evolution of visual effects. With a shift from handmade visual effects, the likes of which Tippett was best known for, to computer-generated graphics and imagery (CGI), Phil saw the writing on the wall and thought the kind of work he was doing with MAD GOD had gone extinct overnight.

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, while the world sheltered through a global pandemic, Phil continued, alone, and completed the final scenes of what is now a complete, feature-length experimental mostly-animated adult-oriented cinematic masterpiece. 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.