Star Wars. Indiana Jones. RoboCop. Jurassic Park. These films and franchises will live forever, and they attained those heights with a little help from Phil Tippett—one of the most legendary visual effects artists in Hollywood history. He’s especially known for his work with stop-motion animation and now, he’s directed his very own stop-motion movie—which looks, quite frankly, awesome.
The film is called Mad God and it’ll have its world premiere in August at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and its North American premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Canada. The trailer is below along with the newly released poster.
That just looks like an awful nightmare and we love it. What is this world? Who are these creatures? What the heck is going on? Well, we don’t really know. What we do know is that Tippett has been working on this film for a long time. (The trailer says 30 years and even just a quick glimpse at his YouTube shows that he posted a behind-the-scenes video nine years ago.) He began working on it during RoboCop 2 and filmed a few scenes, but after working on Jurassic Park, he thought practical effects and stop-motion would probably go extinct. He basically forgot about it and continued to work on projects like Starship Troopers, Willow, Dragonslayer, and the final four Twilight films. In recent years he added holochess to The Force Awakens, some walkers into The Mandalorian, and consulted on all of the Jurassic World films (including the upcoming Dominion), to name just a few.
However, a little while ago, some of Tippett’s colleagues found his original work on Mad God and encouraged him to get back to work on it. During 2020, he had plenty of time on his hands, so he ended up doing just that. The result is an experimental, adult-themed showcase of a whole new world.
As for when you can see Mad God, it seems like it’s concentrating on the festival circuit now but maybe once that’s over it’ll get some kind of streaming or VOD release. We’ll certainly keep you updated. For now, you can follow the film’s official site for more info.
Correction 7/28/2021, 11:30 a.m. ET: A previous version of this post had an exclusive poster that was said to be “not the final” after publication. We were asked to swap it out for the festival poster, which is no longer exclusive to io9.
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