30 Animated Movies That Are Not for Children

Phil Tippett’s Mad God had such a long journey to fruition that many thought it would never arrive. And yet, four short years ago, it finally graced our screens and was exactly the levels of degradation and despair we had hoped for.

The Mad God universe is one of war and violence, in which our nameless protagonist descends in a diving bell through the earth, on a mission to plant a bomb that will destroy everything down there and bring an end to the conflict. But as he steps out of the bell and works his way down, he witnesses pain and suffering and miseries on an untold scale, with rank machinery, hell beasts, and torturers on every level.

The stop-motion feature took 30 years to complete, with Tippett and decades’ worth of his students and volunteers working on it in their spare time. But it’s impossible to say it wasn’t worth it, given the horrors they managed to produce, with a world rich in detail designed to mentally scar the viewer. The plot is almost redundant against the visual experience of Mad God, but even there, Tippett managed to produce something not just coherent but thought-provoking, philosophical, and which challenges us to think about existence and creation (and, of course, destruction!) in a totally different way.