Film: A Town Called Panic
Release date: 22nd November 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 78 mins
Director: Stephane Aubier & Vincent Patar
Starring: Stephane Aubier, Jeanne Balibar, Nicolas Buysse, Véronique Dumont, Bruce Ellison
Genre: Animation
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Belgium/Luxembourg/France
A spin-off of the Aardman Animation backed series of shorts produced in Belgium, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s French-language film version of A Town Called Panic is just as memorable and bizarre as its TV progenitor. The film is as low budget as they come, yet the lovingly created herky-jerky stop motion animation shines through the miniature plastic and papier mache backgrounds to create something quite unique.
The surreal plot (such as it is) of A Town Called Panic follows the comedic mishaps and calamities in the lives of a horse named Horse (Vincent Patar), a cowboy named Cowboy (Bruce Ellison) and an indian named, you guessed it, Indian (Stéphane Aubier).
Attempting to surprise the fairly sensible Horse for his birthday, dim-witted Cowboy and Indian attempt to surprise their equine friend by ordering exactly fifty bricks to build a barbeque. The only problem is that through a mishap in their online order, fifty-million bricks are ordered instead, where subsequently Horse and co’s house is flattened due to a stack of bricks being placed on the roof.
This kicks off a chain of events that sees the lo-fi animated trio go on a series of oddball adventures, ranging from freefalling towards the centre of the earth to being held hostage inside a giant snowball-firing mechanical penguin in a snow covered landscape, and chasing a family of underwater dwelling creatures who have built a house from the stolen walls of the three friends…
The biggest part of A Town Called Panic’s charm lies in its deliberately low-budget and rough around the edges appearance. In many instances, the plastic toy characters waddle along on a flat toy stand which keeps them upright (most comical in the cases of Cowboy and Indian). Indeed, the lo-fi charm of the whole painstaking stop motion production process is evocative of Aardman produced classics such as Wallace & Gromit (even if a little more crudely produced), so it’s no surprise that the company distributed the original television series preceding this feature-length version. The clever homemade ingenuity of directors Aubier and Patar (makers of the similarly styled Cravendale milk ads) is unmistakably present throughout the film, with the plastic and papier mache made miniature sets adding to the surrealism of the whole story.
As the brilliant animators at Pixar know well, there is great humour to be found in the interactions between toys brought to life. Except in A Town Called Panic these toy figures also live in a wacky world suiting their off-the-wall characters, where a horse can read a newspaper and drive a rickety car and a cowboy and indian can make online internet orders for fifty-million bricks. The central relationship between the toy trio is strangely endearing and hilarious, where Horse often plays the straight man (so to speak) to Cowboy and Indian’s often annoying, shouty stupidity.
The bizarre events that the friends go through are often frenetic in pace, and, as such, the 78 minute runtime seems to fly past from sequence to sequence. This means that what there is of a plot can often be confusing and hard to keep up with as a result; where one moment the toys are falling towards the centre of the earth and the next are landed in a desolate snowscape populated by animatronic giant penguins and angry mammoths.
However, Aubier and Patar never cease to make these events anything less than highly entertaining through the ingenious low budget visuals employed, particularly in the snow and water scenes (in addition to the fact that seeing a horse swimming underwater wearing a snorkel is just intrinsically funny). Indeed, the seemingly random and chaotic sequences of fantastic events that occur merely add to the film’s huge sense of fun. For instance, in one scene, in the underwater section, Cowboy, Indian and Horse pretend to be Santa and his helpers to lure the water people into a trap in order to retrieve back the walls for their house. The colours and actions of the animated characters are extremely well animated here, where the animators’ creativity shines through the obvious low-budget necessities. The fast pace and surrealism of events is perhaps even more admirable an achievement by Aubier and Patar when considering the notoriously laborious and time-consuming nature of stop motion animation.
The voice cast (including Aubier and Patar themselves) add a lot to the onscreen characters, from Cowboy and Indian’s high-pitched panicked chatter to the calmly seductive voice of Horse’s equine love interest Madame Longrée (Jeanne Balibar). The French voice cast is universally excellent, yet it is perhaps the voice of Steven (Benoit Poelvoorde) the next door neighbour of the main trio who steals the show with his permanently angry persona. This makes a scene where the underwater people invade his house even more comical, where the rapidly cried line “Oh no! My farm!” is bound to invoke at least a chuckle from the hardiest of souls.
A home-made slice of stop motion brilliance, A Town Called Panic is nothing more than 78 minutes of ingeniously produced joy. Perhaps a longer running time would be too much in the crazy world of Horse and friends, although the film is bound to raise laughs if only out of its sheer madcap inventiveness. DB
