Animator Phil Tippett announced his retirement and the closure of Tippett Studio, holding a two-day auction starting August 28, 2026, to sell off decades of stop-motion models, props, and memorabilia following a 2024 Chapter 11 bankruptcy and acquisition by PhantomFX.
The End of an Era for a Stop-Motion Pioneer
Phil Tippett is officially retired from the racket. Known across the industry for his iconic work on the Star Wars franchise, RoboCop, and Jurassic Park, the animator is winding down his Berkeley-based studio. Decades of physical art, studio tools, storyboards, and models are heading to private collections as part of an aggressively fast liquidation sale.
The two-day auction kicked off on August 28, 2026, placing 273 items up for grabs in an everything-must-go fire sale. Tippett retained only his Academy Awards. He told Berkleyside that he is keeping the Oscars he won for Return of the Jedi and the original Jurassic Park, noting that the wind-down required making “a lot of painful decisions.”
From Dejarik to Digital: Evolution of Tippett Studio
Tippett’s career stretches back to the mid-1970s. His early screen credits include animating the miniature creatures that played Dejarik in the original Star Wars. Into the 1980s, Tippett developed ‘go-motion’, a smoother variant of stop-motion animation used on the lumbering AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strike’s Back and the beast in Dragonslayer.
Founded in 1984 alongside his wife, Jules Roman, Tippett Studio expanded its physical craft into building props for live-action films like the RoboCop trilogy—where Tippett animated the ED-209 combat mech—and eventually integrated computer-generated imagery as digital production took over the industry. The studio worked on Starship Troopers and Tippett’s dark fantasy magnum opus, Mad God, which took roughly 30 years of off-and-on production to complete before finishing in 2021.
Bankruptcy and the Final Projects
Financial pressures caught up with the studio in recent years. Tippett Studio was acquired by the Indian company PhantomFX in 2024. Shortly after the acquisition, financial struggles forced the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, setting the stage for the current asset liquidation.
Despite the studio’s operational wind-down, Tippett’s creative influence persisted across recent streaming and cinematic releases. The studio completed stop-motion work on Alien: Romulus, contributed work to a new Twilight Zone series, and worked on mechanical threats in the third act of The Mandalorian and Grogu, alongside work for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Prior to the closure, Tippett was to lead his studio as director and writer of the stop-motion feature Sentinel.
What is Being Sold in Berkeley
Fans and film speculators descended on Berkeley over the weekend to browse the massive inventory of physical cinema history. Items included signed posters, miniature bugs from Starship Troopers, signed AT-ATs, and foundational studio tools.
