Good morning 🐣

For over 45 years, Phil Tippett has been entertaining us with some of the strangest and most delightful creations in some of the biggest cinematic spectacles of all time.

He started out his career in stop-motion animation, a painstaking process of building physical sets and objects, then photographing then one frame at a time to give the illusion of movement. He later pivoted to computer animation in the ’90s before the industry could leave him behind.

This week he has a new passion project coming out, “Mad God,” that he’s been working on for over 30 years. In celebration, I thought we should take a little trip down Memory Lane to appreciate some of his most iconic works.

Phil Tippett got his big break working on the original “Star Wars” films, first animating the holographic chess board scene and then going on to perfect an animation technique he and his team dubbed “go motion.” (As opposed to stop motion; get it?) Traditional stop motion can have a jittery look, especially when compared to any live-action actors and scenery going on around it. Normal movement has a blurry effect, but crisp, clean stop motion is just a series of photographs. The technology they developed to achieve that motion blur was used in the opening sequences of the second installment, “The Empire Strikes Back” (Disney+ and on demand), on the ice planet Hoth.

And this is where we meet the mighty tauntaun, a reptilian kangaroo that’s domesticated and saddled by the Rebel Alliance for patrol duties around the base. We don’t get to spend much time with them, but as you can see in the above image, tauntauns are majestic animals: sure-footed with long whipping tails, heads held high as they roam the vast frozen wastes. After Luke Skywalker’s mount is devoured by the Yeti-like wampa, Han Solo cuts his own tauntaun open and stuffs Luke inside for warmth, 35 years before Leonardo DiCaprio burrows into his own horse in “The Revenant.”

It’s a brutal end for this perfect creature.

We thank you for your service.

Working between “Star Wars” movies, Tippett began the first installment of what I’ll call his Dragon Cycle: 1981’s “Dragonslayer” (Paramount+, on demand, and free on Kanopy and Pluto TV).

Vermithrax Pejorative. It’s a perfect name for a perfect dragon. The quintessential movie dragon.

Her neck spikes look like the unkempt whiskers of a grandfather from the colonial 1700s. Her flesh wiggles and jiggles. This dragon has seen a lot and doesn’t have time for your crap. When she spews an endless flow of fire at our hero, then faces straight up to the ceiling and bathes the cavern in flame, we all know what’s going through her head.

And shoutout to those little piggy dragon babies. At first Vermithrax is just annoyed, but upon seeing the floppy corpses of her brood, this dragon is pissed and comes stomping out like a Komodo. Respect.

Meanwhile in 1988’s “Willow” (Disney+ and on demand), the title character’s shoddy magic transforms an ape-like troll into a mass of boiling flesh, which he kicks into the castle moat. The water churns and pops out a giant two-headed dragon with a goiter. It’s a unique design with its own personality; a one-of-a-kind, newly birthed monstrosity that I imagine is still trying to figure out just what the hell is going on when one of its heads suddenly explodes.

Last in Tippett’s Dragon Cycle is 1996’s “DragonHeart” (available on demand), which is not something I can actually recommend. The movie’s confusingly goofy and earnest; I mean it was the ’90s after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The dragon’s also got that early CGI look, but it’s big and beefy and voiced by Sean Connery… what more could you ask for? Unlike the other two, I’d definitely become best friends with this dragon.

One of the opening scenes of 1987’s “RoboCop” (AMC+, fuboTV, and on demand) takes place in the boardroom of Omni Consumer Products, where we are introduced to ED-209, a new droid developed to replace law enforcement. Its design is a cross between two of Phil Tippett’s previous creations as seen in the “Star Wars” movies:

• the Empire’s walking assault vehicles and
• the Rancor, a massive and ferocious, but misunderstood beast.

An accident leads to the robot ruthlessly and efficiently slaughtering a board member (and the board callously moving on with its business like any good evil mega-corporation).

Later on we get a taste of ED-209’s more animalistic tendencies. It carefully tests trying to go down stairs, as if dipping its toe in the water, and roars and squeals like a wild animal when it falls on its back. In the finale we see it guarding the company’s front entrance. When RoboCop defeats it, ED-209 topples over, foot twitching in its death throes. A true ghost in the machine.

R.I.P. ED-209. We hardly knew you.

As Phil Tippett’s career progressed, he and his team used the go motion effect on many films, but technology was starting to change by the ’90s. Steven Spielberg hired him to work on “Jurassic Park” (HBO Max and on demand), but another team convinced Spielberg to switch to computer animation during the pre-production process.

Dr. Alan Grant: We’re out of a job.

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Don’t you mean extinct?

This line of dialogue was inspired by an actual conversation between Spielberg and Tippett. Rather than despair, Tippett, ever the consummate badass, learned how to do computer animation and went right back to work. He used his extensive knowledge in animal movement and anatomy to lend a level of realism to the dinosaurs that sometimes still isn’t equaled by today’s films, winning him an Oscar in the process.

On and off for the past three decades, often with the help of friends and volunteers on weekends, Tippett worked on “Mad God,” a personal project that showcases all of his abilities and boundless creativity.

I was able to watch it last year and I gotta say, it’s not for everyone, but I loved it. It doesn’t have any dialogue or even a very particularly strong plot. It’s what the word “phantasmagoria” was invented for — a string of fantastical, sometimes horrifying sequences that descend deeper and deeper into a Hell that’s straight out of some Hieronymus Bosch painting. The official site calls it “a fully practical stop-motion film set in a Miltonesque world of monsters, mad scientists, and war pigs.” That’s probably all you need to know going in. It has incredible imagery, which you can see in this trailer on YouTube.

If it sounds like your cup of tea, or something you’re willing to dip your toes into, it will be available to stream starting tomorrow, June 16, on Shudder and AMC+, and will be playing in select theaters around the country (check out the schedule here).

Phil Tippett has shaped countless dreams and you can read more about him in a new book coming out in October, “Mad Dreams and Monsters: The Art of Phil Tippett and Tippett Studio.” He never went extinct and his monsters will live forever.

Until next time! 👋

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