Those who don’t follow the names of people attached to films as obsessively as I do may not be familiar with the name Phil Tippett, but chances are you are at least familiar with his work already. Star Wars, Jurassic Park, RoboCop, Willow, Starship Troopers, the birthing scene in Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1; when it comes to the art of stop-motion animation and visuals effects in general, he is one of the masters. And over the past thirty years, he has been gradually working on the film that would be his magnum opus. An 83-minute stop-motion film which he would direct, write, produce, and of course, lovingly craft everything on the screen. And in June of this year, this work finally found public release on home of streamed horror Shudder, and holy shit, is this a film that needs to be seen.
Aside from a few vocalised noises here and there, and a surprising number of live-action actors on-screen, this is a film designed to let the visuals do all the talking. There is no dialogue, or at least any legible dialogue, meaning that Tippett is putting a lot of stock into his craft to be able to tell the whole story. And honestly, if I was capable of making something like this, I’d have that kind of confidence as well because this looks absolutely fucking amazing. The amount of attention to detail in the set design, the creature design, even the sound design, on this thing is staggering, making everything from the haunting industrial nightmare the film is set in to the myriad of fleshy monstrosities that inhabit it look and even feel real. Which only makes what takes place even more horrifying.
While there isn’t a standard throughline of a central protagonist or antagonist to further the film’s narrative, there is a lot of connective tissue between each scene. A lot of the imagery shown, from a binocular-eye-view of a man working at a typewriter while a woman is being stabbed in the next room, to machine-pressed zombies(?) leaning over a furnace, to a particularly gruesome display of alchemy involving a newborn baby, juxtapose the acts of creation and destruction. Indeed, as we follow the Assassin’s descent into this hellscape, from his step outside of a diving bell to being quite literally dressed down on-stage in front of an audience, we see that all of this has likely happened before already. And chances are, it will keep happening.
As commentary on the kind of control systems that would allow a world to devolve into such a state, it already makes for potent stuff… but it takes on an even grimmer dimension when put into context with the medium that message is being delivered with. Stop-motion animation, when you really break it down, is the act of giving motion to things that do not move naturally. Giving life to that without life. It’s the kind of artistic mantra behind a lot of the medium’s key figures, from the nature worship of Jan Švankmejer and Takeshi Yashiro, to the ‘tools of storytelling’ approach of studio Laika, right down to Aardman regularly making audiences feel emotions for molded pieces of plasticine.
Except those are all optimistic and quite joyous attitudes towards the act of creation. What Phil Tippett offers here is more in-line with 24 Hours, one of the more infamous stories from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Through these figures, and the varying scales of disregard with which they treat other figures around them, it brings up rather confronting ideas about this kind of storytelling. If stop-motion is the act of giving life, then what does it say when the purpose of that life is to go through cruel and sometimes unspeakably horrific events, just for the emotional catharsis of others? To take the blood of the innocent and turn it into gold. It seems that, rather than any of the characters in front of the camera, the true Mad God is the one standing behind it.
Even more so than the laborious production time that went into this passion project, the real artistic risk here is actively making the audience aware of their own voyeurism; not every audience wants to feel bad for engaging with a work of fiction. But as framed by the desolate landscapes, the frankly isolating lack of voices, and the apocalyptic scope of the story, with its frequent references to atomic bombs and time running out, it creates an impossibly compelling parable about the power of creation, artistic or otherwise. About the responsibility that is put in the hands of mortal men when they decide to create, as the heights of art and the depths of cruelty come from the same place: Within us.
This basically takes a whole bunch of things I absolutely love seeing (stop-motion animation, metatextual subtext, films that challenge their audience, auteur filmmaking, edgelord imagery) and blends them together into the world’s grossest-looking but amazingest-tasting smoothie. It looks like it was pulled out of a living nightmare, but in that horror, there is something quite beautiful about it. It’s an incredibly well-made ode to the wizardry of stop-motion animation, and it deserves a place alongside the all-time greatest examples of the medium.
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