Phil Tippett & Robocop

One of my favorite films of all time is Robocop and I've been dying to talk about it.


The explosions, the gore, witty one liners, and humanist narrative taking place in dystopian society
full of hilarious satire and commentary. The way this film manages to balance all of these tones
effectively is another conversation in itself, in many ways Robocop is a perfect script.
All this aside what I wanted to get into was the stop-motion used in this film by animator Phil Tippett.
Tippett’s work at one point had a place in blockbuster movies, most notably his work in Star Wars. In
the original film he created the chess game on the Millennium Falcon and his work is even more
utilized in Empire with AT-ATs, and Tauntauns. But for some reason his work in Robocop always stood
out to me more, in Star Wars the cut between miniature and life size live action sets is a lot more
seamless and even though the stop motion in Robocop might seem more hokey because of this it
always called more attention to itself and I love that. He manages to give the ED-209s so much
character and humor. I mean just look at this:



Great stuff!
Tippett's name came in class a few weeks back when Jurassic Park was mentioned and how he was
originally called upon to animate the dinosaurs but which was eventually passed on when ILM showed
Spielberg some CGI test footage of a T-rex. At this moment blockbusters would change forever, and
while CG has come a long way and is absolutely incredible today I still feel as though something was
lost along the way. This genre of animation losing its place in blockbuster film and our mainstream
culture shouldn’t be overlooked. In class we talk so much about this different forms of animation and
process by which illusions of movement are created, so I was wondering what other people thought.
Is it important to have more than just CGI at the forefront of our culture? Does anyone else also want
to see this type of artistic expression in special effects in blockbusters again?
Also If you haven’t seen Robocop, you really should. Make sure its the X rated version.

---Rob

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