According to theater director Peter Brooks, a play becomes holy when it reveals the invisible, reflecting the elements of the world that escape our senses. (Brook 1968, 49) Unlike traditional narrative theater, the holy employs incantations, primal screams, and cyclopean set pieces with the goal to shock the audience from the profane world into a numinous realm. (Ibid., 58) Mad God (2021) represents an entry in “holy animation,” accomplishing what religious historian Mircea Eliade calls a hierophany, a phenomenon in which ordinary objects transcend their profane origin. (1987, pg. 11) Sacred reality does not acknowledge the objects’ histories or creators but places them in mythical time. This temporal mode emphasizes recursion over the linear progression of profane time, connecting past events to the present and future; it is “neither changed nor exhausted.” (Ibid., pg. 69) Mad God becomes “holy animation” through its capacity to elevate mundane materials into vital forms, telling a story based on cyclical myths of creation and destruction, produced by a studio dedicated to a sacred communion with a form of animation considered outmoded by the digital visual effects industry. (Poncet and Penso 2022, 93.9%) Mad God’s production process reflects its narrative transition from profane to mythical, an alchemical workshop that reaches back into another era of filmmaking.
Phil Tippett’s film represents decades of work; the world and characters constructed from materials accumulated from the many films on which he labored, from Robocop 2 (1990) to Jurassic Park (1993). (Poncet and Penso 2022, 87.8%) Mad God employs mass-produced commodities, garbage, and recycled molds and models. The sheer volume and scale of this accretion becomes unfathomable. Lighting and animation render these objects into hierophanies. Tippett and his team elevate such mundane materials into the sacred through the craft of stop-motion animation, in which liquids in tanks depict the formation of a universe as flecked black paint on glass becomes the starry void of space. (92.1%)
Mythical time plays a central theme in the film as well, through the suggested recursion of events and the use of long, slow, sequences. The opening features the protagonist, the assassin, descending into the underworld with a briefcase. Tippett wanted this downward journey to be nearly unendurable, just on the edge of causing the audience to leave out of boredom. (88.5%) This sensitizes the audience to the sensation of time, the depths feel impossibly fathomless, as objects like massive nautilus shells take on ominous significance. Reaching their destination, the assassin sets the suitcase down among mountains of other identical suitcases, suggesting this quest has been undertaken countless times before. Opening the suitcase reveals a ticking time bomb. Linear time breaks down, and the world remains suspended between seconds.
Captured, the assassin is surgically eviscerated. The clock on the wall slows to a stop. From the assassin’s body, a child is extracted and alchemically rendered into gold powder, setting off the creation of a new universe. Planets congeal and cities emerge, before terrorists detonate a bomb, scorching the world in a flash of light. Clocks run forward at a rapid pace before suddenly reversing, candles meltdown and reform, and visages of characters encountered in the film dissolve together. The film ends with another descent in mythical time, suggesting these events will continue again and again. This eternal repetition is fundamental to the emergence of the sacred. (Eliades 1987, pg. 108) As the French chemist, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, observes “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” (Ibid., 89%) The film depicts a cosmos destroyed and created in endless succession forever, much like the materials used in its production.
The film’s capacity to elevate profane materialities and temporalities to the mythical is intimately connected to its production process. Tippett’s studio became “a temple of practical effects history,” in which artists of the digital era could reach into the past and get their hands on real materials. (Poncet and Penso 2022, 87.8%) Animator/compositor Arne Hain describes the process of working with real objects on such a film as quite meditative. Its lack of linear narrative allowed room for intuition while its materiality enabled happy accidents made only possible on a physical set. (Ibid. 91.6%)
Writing much of the narrative in a hypnagogic state, Tippett’s themes remain largely unconscious. (Poncet and Penso 94.7%) Eliades argues the unconscious is shaped by countless encounters with the existential, imbuing the content with a “religious aura.” (1987 pg. 210) Tippett allowed great creative freedom for those participating in the film, teaching a generation of animators to mobilize instinct over intellectualization, creating space for the sacred in the otherwise linear process of animation.
Mad God achieves the goals of holy theater, accessing the sacred through hierophany via imbuing mundane materials with undeniable vitality, entering into mythic time, while creating a space for storytelling inspired by intuition. The mundane assassin’s quest mirrors that of Marduk slaying the great dragon Tiamat, fashioning the world from its flesh, and Yahweh who created the universe following the defeat of the monstrous Rahah. (Eliades 1987, pg. 48) Crafting the sacred from the profane, the film invokes a tragic divine history in which one reaffirms their connection to the sacred through the reactualization of these cosmic events. (Ibid., pg. 106) In this way, Mad God’s holy animation gives the audience a glimpse at indescribable phenomena, rendering the invisible visible through stop-motion’s alchemical transformation of profane materials.
Works Cited
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. United Kingdom, MacGibbon & Kee, 1968.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane; the Nature of Religion. United States, Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Poncet, Alexandre, and Penso, Gilles. Mad Dreams and Monsters: The Art of Phil Tippett and Tippett Studio. United States, ABRAMS, 2022.
Dr. Colin Wheeler researches creative discourse in media industries, with a focus on the animation studios in the United States. Remaining a passionate creator and critic of animated media, he makes short experimental films that incorporate animation, puppetry, and live-action. After completing his MFA in Animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design, he went on to earn a Doctorate in Communication at Georgia State University. Allowing him to explore the industry as a practitioner, he uses his on the ground perspective to inform higher theories on production cultures and the creative class. When he’s not researching media, he teaches storyboarding and animation history at Kennesaw State University.