Next Club Meeting: April 20, 2024, at the Fountaindale Public Library in Bolingbrook from 11:00 am - 5:00 pm

The Animatrix Network is an anime & manga fan club located in the Southwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. We usually meet on the third Saturday of each month (except when holidays or conventions coincide). The meetings are free and open to the public. Join us for a day filled with anime.

This site provides news, reviews, commentaries, and previews of the world of anime and everything it inspires, such as live-action films, comics, music, art, and other weird things to enjoy and contemplate.

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

A film by the world's best stop-motion animator...

MAD GOD
From the imaginative mind of Phil Tippett, the world's pre-eminent stop motion animator...

The film opens with a tall figure shrouded in a jacket and gas mask known only as The Assassin descending into a ruined, hellish world via a diving bell. In his possession the Assassin has a map of the world and a suitcase with a bomb which he has been tasked with detonating behind enemy lines within the desolate world; however, the map slowly deteriorates along the way.

Continuing his trek through the ruins, traveling through mutant lands, The Assassin encounters captive electronic torture victims and other horrors. Eventually he comes to find a city behind enemy lines, which is home to an army of nameless, faceless drones ruled by a baby-babbling monstrosity with filthy teeth and seared flesh. The Assassin halts for a moment here, pondering whether or not to take an ally, before he decides to escape while he can and descends into the bowels of the city, leaving a drone to be killed for walking away from the others. The Assassin discovers a mountain of suitcases just like his own, beneath the city bowels. These contain bombs, which his own bomb will detonate. As the Assassin primes his bomb and prepares to set it off, sitting down to await his death along with presumably every other mutant and person behind enemy lines, the Assassin fails to notice the creeping presence of a mutant of technological design. The mutant then pounces on The Assassin, capturing him and dragging him away as the bomb fails to detonate.
The Assassin is put on public display, where he is stripped and tortured in front of a mass of spectators. Shackled to a table, The Assassin lies there for what appears to be many days and weeks. His bandages, which cover his entire body, are yellowed with age, and his one exposed eye is red with dryness, having not blinked for quite a while. The Surgeon, or the Torturer, appears with a Nurse, who both begin a sadistic medical procedure upon the weakened Assassin. Systematically, and painfully, and ultimately fatally for the Assassin, the Surgeon cracks open The Assassin's chest, and begins rummaging through his chest cavity. Jewelry, and books, metaphors for useful secrets of war, are pulled and strewn about and read through - a particularly interesting book catches the Surgeon's eye, and he investigates, before throwing it away. Eventually, after a long period of rummaging and bloody searching, the Surgeon finds his goal; a precious, screaming child. The Surgeon hands it to the Nurse.

In the world above, the Last Man gives a map forged by witches to another Assassin and sends him down in another diving bell. Driving a motorcycle and then a jeep, the New Assassin follows the map through a munitions depot, a graveyard, and a war zone before descending down a spiral roadway. The nurse brings the baby to a floating creature who escorts the child to an alchemist’s lair. The alchemist grinds the baby into liquid, smelts the liquid into metal, and crushes the metal into crystals that he hands back to the creature.

The creature scatters the crystals into a fiery portal. A new universe forms that rapidly decays into another ruined world.

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