Produced, written, directed, designed and largely animated by legendary visual effects maestro Phil Tippett, this extraordinary work, made mostly with stop-motion animation and the odd human performer, has been in production off and on for roughly 30 years – possibly making it cinema’s longest side hustle. Tippett reportedly constructed his grotty, Bosch-ian monsters and set them fighting and futzing about a hellish intricate landscape in his off-time. That was when he wasn’t designing and overseeing robots and creatures for Paul Verhoeven films such as RoboCop and Starship Troopers, doing visual effects for the vamps and werewolves on the Twilight saga, or breathing life into dinosaurs for the Jurassic Park franchise and beasties in the Star Wars world.
That potted CV suggests that Tippett is a talent whose work straddles the epistemic shift from mechanical to digital effects. So it’s fitting that this work of his own imagining, completed with help from other effects boffins, stands as a testament to the handmade art of stop-motion, not all that different in terms of technique from the kind of animation Ray Harryhausen was making in the 1940s onwards that inspired Tippett himself to become a film-maker.
