Tag Archives: Phil Tippett

When the Artist Becomes the Art, EVIL Takes Over Their Soul. “Stopmotion” reviewed! (Acorn Medial International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Stopmotion” Available on Blu-ray!

Living under her arthritis-enfeebled mother’s tremendous stop motion reputation and browbeaten into being the hands of completing her overbearing mother’s last film, Ella Blake can’t find her own voice in the animated art form.  During one already tension filled morning, Ella’s mother has a stroke and falls into a comatose state.  The unfortunate opportunity opens a door for Ella to complete her mother’s final masterpiece on her own as she moves out from the traumatic memories of her home and into a vacant high-rise apartment to be left in occupied solitude, but when a curious and brash little girl finds her mother’s story mundane and offers an alternative, more grotesque story, one which insidiously fascinates with disturbing themes and grisly creativity, Ella finds herself starting afresh, listening to the yarn of a young girl’s chilling vision, whole slowly cracking under the immense pressure of completing a film worth calling her own. 

With the timesaving, cost-efficient computer-generated imagery, many once popular animation techniques have nearly become a lost art in the recent feature film pool.  Stopmotion is one of those dangerously close to extinction animation styles, which has played a pivotal part in some of the most thrilling and magical films in history, such as, but not limited to, the live-action dominion of Desmond Davis’s “Clash of the Titans,” Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” films, and Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” to the fully animated features of Henry Celick’s “Caroline,” another Burton film in “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” and Phil Tippett’s “Mad God.”  Stopmotion animator and filmmaker Robert Morgan aims to add his entry to the dwindling, yet sustaining for now, artform with his 2023, debut full-length film “Stopmotion” co-written by Morgan and Robin King (“Mnemophrenia”).  The UK film is produced by Alain de la Mata and Christopher Granier-Deferrere under the French production company Blue Light and is presented by the UK’s British Film Institute, or BFI, with IFC Films and Shudder.

In the tragic lead role of spiraling down through pressurized suffering , trying to surface and take a breath from Ella Blake’s domineering mother’s shadow, is Aisling Franciosi, an Irish actress who also had a principal role in the segmented Dracula tale of “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” released the same year.  As Ella Blake, Franciosi plays into the young woman’s meek and submissive behavior as a subservient daughter to her conceited mother (Stella Gonet, “Spencer”).  All the while on the inside, Blake’s bottled voice contains lethal doses of self-destruction, barring her indefinitely inside the mental boundaries of her psyche, and never surfacing between the already emotional scarring and the grief for mother’s authoritarian parenting as Blake herself becomes very much like the armature puppet she manipulates into position for her film, needing that command structure to follow orders.  That need to be creative is so strong within Blake she fabricates another persona splitting soul into a dissociative disorder that takes the yoke and, ultimately, control over her and her project.  And, in some distressing and grim fairytale type of way, the voice recreates a story that parallels Ella’s life with the Ash Man (effects and prosthetic-cladded actor James Swanton, “Host”) chasing down and manipulating a wax puppet version of Ella in a grotesque mirror dynamic between Ella and her mother.  Tethering Ella ever so barely to reality is flexible boyfriend Tom (Tom York) and his flaunting animation corporate head Polly (Therica Wilson-Read, “Suicide Club”) to what’s in front of her rather to the voice inside of her but their truth is far too combative for Ella to stay fastened to a much strong influencing voice that’s far too close to her.   The upcoming “The Beast Within” actress, Caoilinn Springall, rounds out the cast as the little girl of the apartment building. 

As much as I wanted to seep and soak into “Stopmotion’s” one-frame-at-a-time madness, I couldn’t help but to think I’ve seen this story before.   A sort of déjà vu encircles me and hits me squarely in the gut as I lament over the possibility of feeling the same way I felt before with another film.  Then, it struck me like a bolt of lightning that this storyline shares similarities with the 2021, Prano Bailey-Bond film, “Censor.”  Now, I’m not saying “Stopmotion” is a direct carbon copy but follows a familiar pathway, a movie industry outlier forced by life and submersed under the weight to finishing what the heroines have started only to crack in deep obsession.  On a high level, character impetuses that lead to the same conclusion are in stark contrast and Ella Blake’s descent fathoms family trauma and fixation with trying to be an individual and not just a minor component of a bigger, more impressive, machine that overshadows the necessary cog that makes the whole operate.  Coupled with surreal imagery, otherworldly stopmotion animation, and physical effects that’ll make your skin crawl, or melt like wax, “Stopmotion” enlivens an animator filmmaker’s creativity outside the personifying vocation, blending genres and animations to exact a reality bending mania.  Morgan’s fragmented segues evoke an alternate reality that skips the portions where the audiences’ minds might fill in the gaps.  There is no gap filling, only essential, contextual moments, as if Morgan is the puppeteer to his story by arranging the movements one frame at a time reflect Ella’s poignant reminders and dour moments that mold her.

“Stopmotion” animates a living hell.  The Shudder exclusive lands onto a RLJ Entertainment subsidiary UK label, Acorn Media International, Blu-ray release.  The Blu-ray is presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio encoded with AVC, high definition 1080p, on a BD25.  Though in spartanly stark and gritty-glum set dressings, “Stopmotion’s” grading is on the lighter side of saturation diffusion, held mostly to a shade array of reds, greens, browns, and yellows.  There is numerous isolating, low key-lit scenes concentrated on the framed charactered and engulfing them in darkness but with that, there were no notifiable issues with posterization or banding.  Depth, especially in the stop-motion portion of reality, has spatial length and dimensional delineation, a testament to Morgan’s stop motion animator’s background and experience as some examples of the craft often look flat.  The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 offers a lossless fidelity through the broodiness of Lola de la Mata’s compositional vocal and violin score, stringing through the surrealistic switch of cerebral crossfire.  Dialogue creates no challenges with a clear and clean presentation, range of effects heighten in animation’s Foley, and, again, depth creates that an enwreathed sound field through the back and side channels.  English subtitles are optionally available.  Special features include an interview with star Aisling Francosi, interview with writer-director Robert Morgan, and a behind-the-scenes featurette.  The Acorn Media release is rated 18 for Strong Bloody Violence and gore, has a runtime of 94 minutes, and, though not listed, played in region A playback so does seem to have at least dual-regional encoding between A and B.  The tangible Blu-ray comes in a standard Blu-ray case with a creepy, head-nesting puppet artwork.  The interior has standard appeal with just the disc inside, pressed with the same front cover art. 

Last Rites: “Stopmotion” depicts a tragic fall but not from grace in what is a more sad and sullen reality, and the escape is a freshly personified hell of one’s own making. 

“Stopmotion” Available on Blu-ray!

An Odyssey through the Phantasmagoria EVIL. “Moon Garden” reviewed! (Oscilloscope Laboratories / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Take a Stroll Through the “Moon Garden” on Blu-ray

Five-year-old Emma is caught in the middle of her beleaguered parent’s marital strife.  When Emma witnesses one particular heated and nasty argument between mom and dad, she flees to escape the anger only to slip and fall down the stairs, hitting her head that puts her into a comatose state.  She awakes lost, confused, and consumed in an industrialized gray zone, loomed over by strange land’s dark gloom and also curious wonderment that both frighten and amuses her.  As Emma looks from the inside out, seeing her parents come together from the struggles to cope and worriment surrounding her comatose body, the young girl is determined to make it back to her parents by trekking through the bizarre land, but a menacing, chattering being feeding off her fear and tears pursues her and she has to rely on the amiable ambivalence of unique strangers that inhabit this world to help her escape the nightmare and return home.

Cut with relatable bleak themes of family dysfunction, Ohio-born filmmaker Ryan Stevens Harris undertakes fantasy rarely seen in this day and age of computer visuals and special effects, probably not since “Labyrinth” or “The Never Ending Story” of the 1980s.  Stevens, chiefly an editor in the movie industry with credits ranging from indies like “What’s Eating Todd?” to big-budget blockbusters like Roland Emmerich’s “Moonfall,” writes and directs “Moon Garden,” a wayfaring grim fairytale with visual ferocity in a practical DIY-fashion and without major studio help.  The 2022 fantasy envelopes elements of difficult navigation surrounding nuclear family problems through the quivery, unguarded eyes and immense imagination of a very young child still developing those rationality and interpretation skills to make it all make sense.  Based off Harris’s proof-of-concept 13-minute short film “Every Dream is a Child with Teeth,” “Moon Garden” is a production of Harris’s Fire Trial Pictures and is self-produced alongside Fire Trail Picture’s co-founded John Michael Elfers and wife, Colleen.

“Moon Garden” is truly a family affair with not just the husband-and-wife collaboration behind the camera but also the couple’s young daughter, Haven Lee Harris, at the forefront as the enchanted young Alice in Wonderland-esque wanderer named Emma.  Haven, who also starred in the “Every Dream is a Child with Teeth” short,” fully embraces Emma’s forming schism between her parents and being engulfed by an intimidating atmosphere that’s often bursting with melancholy and acrimony, a credit to the father-director who can turn the darkness to light by making behind-the-scenes an engagingly fun atmosphere for his impressionable, yet talented, daughter to thrive as an untrained actor in her debut performance.  As Emma travels through the eclectic settings of sewers and steam pipes, dilapidated houses, swampy overgrowth, and towering observatories, she comes across equally eclectic figment inhabitants that help her, a hammering string musician (Phillip E. Walker, “13 Mysteries”), a sullen groom (Timothy Lee DePriest, (“BnB HELL”), a budding mud witch (Angelica Ulloa, “Gnome Alone”), and a lonely Princess (Maria Olsen, “Vile”), but not all seek the wellbeing of Emma as a haunting levitating and sinister pursuer (Morgana Ignis, “Satanic Hispanics”), garbed in inspired militarism and a void where only sharp, chattering teeth makeup it’s face.  Each character is bred out of Emma’s emotional states brought to fruition by her extensive imagination, correlated by her playing with resembling toys before her accident.  Mom and dad are played by Augie Duke (“The Badger Game”) and Brionne Davis (“Mom and Dad”) for the first act and through flasbacks of the second and third.  The parents inadvertently inject sorrow into the heart of their daughter caught in the middle of the martial affliction.  Duke saturates leadenly into the mother’s depression with poignancy and potency, fueled by Davis’s uncompassionate workaholic for the father, and this sparks the tension that requires a forced happy family face around Emma whose brimming at the edge of her imagination for a better existence.  Filling in the cast gaps are Téa Mckay and Emily Meister. 

If Phil Tippett directed a movie from a script by Lewis Carroll, “Moon Garden” would be the outcome.  Pure imagination and creativity ignite a new world to travel down toward the rabbit hole, utilizing a series of practical techniques to show how grotesquely and beautifully grandiose this world can be erected and the odd characters can come alive all without breaking the bank.  With any abstract art, grasping concepts and correlating visual expressions can be difficult but with “Moon Garden” there’s a sense of celebration for movie magic.  Between detailed miniatures, visual compositing, manipulative time and camera techniques, practical special effects, etc., Ryan Stevens Harris promenades the audience through the different levels, stages, and exhibits of what is a carefully curated museum of ingenuous imagination, which sounds like something Willy Wonka would melody about, and does so while tapping into our own fears as not only having once been children ourselves with vivid imaginations looming in ever crevice of our minds but also in us lucky enough to be parents as Harris interposes clips of Emma peering in reverse through the looking glass, into reality, to see her parents reformulating a bond through the muck of grief, worry, and love for their child in what is a parents’ worst nightmare to experience.  “Moon Garden” can be intense and scary at times but certainly could be kid friendly and empowering for little tykes afraid to take on the daunting outside world or the inside of uncertainty. 

Our first venture into an Oscilloscope Laboratories release is anything but paramnesia. “Moon Garden” arrives onto an AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, 50-gigabyte Blu-ray transferred and processed from the original 35mm print, as Fire Trial Films is a 35mm production company, and presented in a widescreen 2.39:1 aspect ratio. Having scored age-worn film stock, Harris achieves some unusually neat prints that saturate the colors differently than if the stock was in brand new, pristine condition. An ingrained darkness from the stock adds a pinch of otherworldly tincture that accentuate the already overwhelming serrated slumberland atmospherics coupled with a filmy layer of good-clean grain. Primary colors don’t often appear like primary due to the aged film stock but pop in distinct crush, nonetheless. Emma’s unconscious dimensional detour is full of pocket voids, shadowy symmetrical shapes, and dreamy in exact detail on all accounts without being empyrean or wistfully. The English language DTS-HD 5.1 master audio and the film’s original uncompressed stereo 2.0. The lossless surround sound mix options to deliver the identical audio measures in comparison the uncompressed audio while also slinking through the side and back channels for full-bodied immersion into Emma’s tribulating trek back home. Dialogue comes through exceedingly well-enough albeit the multi-faceted improved industrial soundtrack sneaks in staggering oversteps at times. Speaking of the soundtrack, an original score by composer Michael Deragon, the transitional tunes, melodies, discordances, and synths are just a taste of the eclectic, haunting sounds that navigate Emma’s journey and the elegant, melancholic, and even comforting lullabies by Augie Duke as the mother bring a sort of peace and tranquility that resets the intensity and fear of the child in peril. The chattering teeth, though comically inclined to an extent, are especially effective as a looming, omnipresent pursuant. Optional English subtitles are available. Special features on the Blu-ray include a making of “Moon Garden” featurette that lets director Ryan Stevens Harris be giddy-as-school boy proud to show off and explain the how-tos of his masterclass piece of creativity as well as to dote on his sweet daughter Haven, Harris’s 12-minute proof-of-concept short film “Every Dream is a Child with Teeth,” a single deleted scene, and the theatrical trailer. Oscilloscope’s Blu-ray comes in a clear Amaray case with a what looks almost to be an innominate water-colored cover art composition, with gothic overtures, of a few characters with the reverse side bathed in a blue landscape setting that Emma crosses which is shown in the film. The disc art is curiously plain with the Oscilloscope Laboratories logo and the title “Moon Garden” above it. The not rated Blu-ray comes region free and with a 93-minute runtime.

Last Rites: Ever since post-credits, The M Machine’s Moon Song and Promise of a Rose Garden has regained ground in my mind and it’s a very fitting pair of tracks not only for their keyword titles but also for its industrial beats and unconventional sonority structures similar to the cadence of the deep space wandering that is “Moon Garden” as visually the imagery confounds the senses and surrealism takes hold of us as this sweet and innocent little girl confronts alone a world much bigger than anything than we could ever imagine, and only she can pull herself through while the discordant parents can only be a unifying beacon of light and hope. Highly recommended.

Take a Stroll Through the “Moon Garden” on Blu-ray

A Stop-Motion EVILscape of Totalitarian Hell! “Mad God” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Descending from above into the depths of grotesque terror and suffering, The Assassin steps out of the drop pod with a gas mask, industrial armor, a suitcase, and a crumbling map.  Bearing witness to the surrounding horrors – cruel experimentations, enslaved beasts, tortured manufactured slave laborers, dog-eat-dog atrocities – The Assassin sallies forth, descending deeper into the primordial pit.  The missioned at hand is to set an explosive charge that will eradicate out the ruinous, oppressive filth that aims to corrupt the everything, but there the darkness won’t be so easily wiped away and The Assassin must stay in the shadows and out of sight or else become a tortured fixture in the fray. 

“Mad God?”  More like mad genius!  Phil Tippett’s 34-year, stop-motion, pet-project “Mad God” is the purest Hell I’ve ever seen.  Tippet, famed stop-motion and puppeteer effects artist responsible for the iconic visual effects and stop motion work in fan films such as the original “Star Wars” saga and the “Robocop” franchise as well as cult favorites “Howard the Duck,” “Piranha” and “House II:  The Second Story,” started “Mad God” in 1987 that become more of an ambitious project than originally thought and once the 1993 saw a computer generated effects revolution with a little prehistoric dino-disaster film called “Jurassic Park”, a film Tippett also did work on as dinosaur movement consulting supervisor because of his expertise on the short “Prehistoric Beasts,” the gifted animator had shelved “Mad God” for about 20 years with the though a newer, shiner, computer-driven animation would be the next best thing studios would ardently desire. This two-decade span gave Tippett time to outline objectives and really expand upon ideas of how “Mad God” should look and feel when conveyed. Tippett co-produces the film with Jack Morrissey under Tippett Studios and presented by IFC Midnight and AMC’s Shudder.

Just because “Mad God” is dialogue-less doesn’t make the “Mad God” voiceless. All around, in every scene, is a disturbing commentary or an unhinged metaphor bred mostly out of the animatable inanimate, but there are some live action performances weaved into the mad tapestry of monstrous titans and despot of cruelty. The most clearly discernible face of the lot comes from a director, “Repo Man” and “Sid and Nancy” director Alex Cox to be more exact. Cox plays the long nailed and regime-driven “Last Man,” representing divine leadership of a modest, dieselpunk heaven above a more organic and grotesque hell-type world. Only on screen for perhaps a total of 5-to-10 minutes, Cox grunts and gestures with precision articulation to give off a fair and just ruler impression. Niketa Roman plays the next real person to have some substantial screen time. Less of an actress and more of an animator by trade, with credits including “Blade II,” “Jurassic World,” and “Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker,” Roman finds an expressive talent in her striking, heavily made-up eyes overtop a surgical mask and gown when whisking away one of the Assassin’s souls to be studied and experimented on by a broodingly ethereal entity. Other micro-performances include minor roles of tortured monkeys, various iron-cladded Assassins, witches, and gnomes from Satish Ratakonda, Harper Gibbons, Arnie Hain, David Laur, Chris Morley, Anthony Ruivivar, Tucker Gibbons, Tom Gibbons, Hans Brekke, and Jake Freytag.

“Mad God’s” possibilities and interpretations are endless. Phil Tippett pulls from a motley of inspiration that includes, but is not limited to the fantastical, sometimes hellish, paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the wacky, often gonzo animation of Tex Avery, the stop-motion titans of Nathan Juran’s “The 7 Voyages of Sinbad, and Dante’s Inferno. The mind is a deranged and wonderful creator of the macabre and of the aberrant and as a receiving device, the mind can also, if opened up enough, accept such visceral visuals of bowel fluids being jettisoned out by electric shock and into the mouth of an organic machine that manufactures fibrous, lumbering humanoids for slave labor. Like lemmings in a way, these exploited shadows of human beings will succumb under their own demise or at the gnarled and unforgiving hands of their master’s gargoyleish work-whippers. “Mad God’s” eye for detail is greatly disturbing to see cities in monolithic cities and cultures in ruins, the composite depth between foreground and background action in one scene reminds me a lot of older works like “The Neverending Story” or “Clash of the Titans” that create a vast scale with smaller objects, and the playful irony of a nightmare netherworld being commanded over by a baby’s babble doesn’t nearly seem to a stretch from the truth. As the multiple Assassins trek through the chaos and the insanity, an overwhelming sense of life is meaningless scores the landscape as there isn’t an ounce of compassion or empathy to be had or displayed for any of the malformed creatures and wretched humans. A laborer is crushed by a stone – no biggie. A cute and cuddle animal is attacked and whisked away for food storage – all in the day of cruelty. A man is stripped of his armored gear, injected with a mysterious substance, and prepped for exploratory surgery – all for show in front of a live clapping and cheering audience. The only compassion I can make sense is the Assassin’s mission to blow up this God-forsaken world of eternal suffering to restart the heart. Madness grinds bones, fillets spirits, and crushes souls in Phil Tippet’s Godless underworld and can haunt you even while you’re awake.

A surreal stop-motion wonder and excruciation, “Mad God” brings all the horrors of the subconscious mind to the surface with a high-definition, 1080p Blu-ray. The region 2, PAL encoded release from UK distributor Acorn Media International presents Tippet’s tour de force in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio and the image is purposefully varied to exhibit different strokes of craft as students would assist Tippet with contrastive topographies to carve out an apocalypse-riddled world that’s in a state of a violet retrogression. Tippet and Tippet Studio visual effects artist, Chris Morley, pivot to “Mad God’s” cinematography appearance with brooding, darker tones that illuminate and are erratically sparked with warm neon glows or brilliant voltage streaming through highly conductive bodies. Some earlier scenes from the late 80’s have natural grain from the 35mm stock and then later, more recent scenes have a cleaner, sleeker look with the digital recording. The Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound mix has an all-embracing range, mostly with sudden and alarming blazons of guttural roars, unnerving baby babble, elongated zaps and shocks, and the indistinct yips and yaps of a mad world, that sustains on a line of being lesser than crisp, which might be contributed to the inexact capture of depth as sometimes all sounds casts like from inside the reverberations of a fishbowl. Descriptive SDH subtitles are available. Bonus features include audio commentary with Phil Tippett and “Pan’s Labyrinth’s” Guillermo del Toro, cast & crew commentary, an interview with Phil Tippett, “Mad God’s” various painter, cartoonist, animator, and psychology inspirations, the making-of “Mad God,” Maya Tippett’s Worse than the Demon – Phil Tippet’s daughter’s 12-minute thesis documentary of her father’s 34-year passion project journey, Academy of Art & “Mad God,” a behind-the-scenes montage, and a behind-the-scenes photo gallery. “Mad God” has a runtime of 84 minutes and is UK certified 18 for strong violence and gore. A motion picture diorama of Phil Tippett’s neoteric psyche, “Mad God” is wrath wrapped in heart and soul, two descriptors not topmost on the surface but are meticulously integrated into every frame of pain, suffering, and despair.