On December 6, RLJE Films will release Shudder’s Mad God, Phil Tippet’s 30 years in the making stop-motion animated horror film, on DVD and SteelBook DVD/Blu-ray. The project won the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival’s Most Groundbreaking Film and Best Animated Feature, as well as the 2021 Sitges Award for Best Visual Effects.
In the film, The Assassin travels through a forbidding world of tortured souls, decrepit bunkers, and wretched monstrosities forged from the most primordial horrors of the subconscious mind. Every set, creature, and effigy in this macabre masterpiece is hand-crafted and painstakingly animated using traditional stop-motion techniques.
The Los Angeles Times stated that there has, “never been a movie quite like it: an unflinching tour through the darkest recesses of a brilliant artist’s mind.”
The Austin Chronicle called the film, “A hellish accumulation that, in its entirety, creates a divine comedy.”
The film is “a work of a genuine visionary, and has all the makings of an instant cult classic,” stated Sight & Sound.
Check out the trailer… if you dare!
Exclusive bonus content featured on the release includes:
- Commentary with Phil Tippett and Guillermo del Toro
- Cast & Crew Commentary
- Interview with Mad God Writer/Director Phil Tippett
- Mad God Influences & Inspirations
- Maya Tippett’s The Making of Mad God
- Maya Tippett’s Worse Than the Demon
- Academy of Art University & Mad God
- Behind-the-Scenes Montage
- Behind-the-Scenes Video Photo Gallery
Tippett’s career in visual effects spans over 45 years and includes two Academy Awards, six nominations, one BAFTA award, two Emmys, and the Winsor McCay and Georges Méliès awards. Tippett’s work includes the now iconic creatures in Star Wars, the revolutionary marriage of computer technology with stop-motion (an invention he termed “go-motion”) on films such as Robocop, the Academy Award-winning dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and the giant swarming insects in Starship Troopers. Additional visual effects work includes Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Willow, and The Haunting.
More recently, Tippett designed and created a multi-dimensional dark ride for a theme park in China, based on the film The Monkey King: Havoc in Heavens Palace (2014), and is currently working on the Disney series, The Mandalorian (2021).
Whitney is a freelance writer focusing on VFX-driven fantasy film & TV as well as preschool animation.
