Anyone interested in the art and history of special effects should know the name Phil Tippett. But even if you don't, you've certainly seen his work as one of the leading effects artists of the past 45 years. His stop-motion work in the '70s and '80s pushed an old medium to new heights, and in the '90s, he helped ease the transition from old-school practical effects to the new frontier of CG animation.

With his feature directorial debut, Mad God, now playing at film festivals, let's look back at five of Tippett's most impressive special effects accomplishments.

Star Wars

empire-strikes-back-at-at-walker

After the generally forgotten movie The Crater Lake Monster, Phil Tippett's first major film credit was on the original Star Wars in 1977, for which he animated the dejarik holochess set aboard the Millennium Falcon, as well as doing uncredited puppetry work. On The Empire Strikes Back, Tippett would get an even more impressive animation showcase with the tauntauns and AT-AT Walkers. For Empire, Tippett and the crew at Industrial Light and Magic utilized a process called "go-motion," which makes stop-motion more realistic by adding motion blur.

Tippett was also a creature designer for Return of the Jedi, the film which won him his first Oscar; for one of his most memorable designs, the Rancor, he served as a puppeteer. He would return to the galaxy far, far away to animate another dejarik scene in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens.

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RoboCop

Robocop ED-209

For Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi action film RoboCop, Tippett was responsible for the stop-motion animated shots of the malfunctioning killer police droid ED-209. He did the initial concept art for the intimidating robot, while Craig Davies, who designed military helmets before entering the special effects field, built the full model for Tippett to then animate.

Due to a limited budget, Tippett could not use go-motion, so he instead mixed traditional stop-motion with rear-projected live-action backgrounds. The ED-209's screentime is limited, but Tippett's animation makes a strong impression within that time, creating an antagonist that's scary yet also funny in its slapstick attempts to stay balanced on two legs. He went on to do more animation for the sequels, RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3.

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Jurassic Park

T-Rex-attacking-in-Jurassic-Park

Tippett had animated dinosaurs before in his 1984 short film Prehistoric Beast and the 1985 documentary Dinosaur! He was also developing a dinosaur movie with Verhoeven (which would eventually change directors and become Disney's Dinosaur) when Steven Spielberg asked Tippett to do go-motion animation for Jurassic Park. But the go-motion process was abandoned in favor of an innovative combination of CGI and animatronics.

When Spielberg saw the first CGI tests, he told Tippett, "You're out of a job," to which Tippett replied, "Don't you mean extinct?" Tippett, however, stayed employed as an animation supervisor and won his second Oscar. After sitting the second and third movies in the series out, he returned as a dinosaur consultant/supervisor for Jurassic World and its sequels, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and next year's Jurassic World: Dominion.

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Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers bugs

In the '90s, Phil Tippett seemed well primed to bridge the gap between old-school and new-school special effects. Though CGI would ultimately take over the vast majority of Hollywood effects work, Starship Troopers, like Jurassic Park, used an expert combination of animatronics and CGI that still holds up much better than the majority of purely-CGI effects from the same time period.

The action scenes featuring the alien bugs were so effective as ultraviolent action spectacle that many viewers at the time somehow missed Paul Verhoeven's rather obvious-in-retrospect satire of fascist propaganda. Tippett has said this was the last Hollywood production he was truly proud of, with most of his work since then being done primarily for money to support his own independent projects.

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Mad God

Mad God

So what does a feature film directed by Phil Tippett look like? Visually astonishing and possibly unwatchably disgusting. Mad God, a stop-motion tour of Hell that Tippett has been developing on and off since 1988, has finally been completed, premiering at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival and subsequently screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Fantasia Fest. Forgoing narrative almost entirely, it's an incredible work of stop-motion animation so lifelike it becomes a living nightmare.

This amazing craft is used to display so many violent tortures, grotesque monsters and bodily fluids that, without a strong plot to create emotional investment, the movie risks becoming just too much for most viewers. Tippett previously released individual scenes as short films, which might be the more digestible way to experience Mad God. For the niche audience that knows what they're getting into, Mad God is a cinematic experience unlike anything you've seen before.

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