A Town Called Panic

I first became aware of this bizarre Belgian animation series from the Aardman's Darkside DVD which contained the first (and only) season and I loved the surreal humour and completely off the wall nature of the short stories and character interactions.

In case you're never seen A Town Called Panic, it is set in a rural area where a Cowboy, an Indian and a Horse live together. They are just called Cowboy, Indian and Horse, with Horse as the sensible one of the three. It is Horse's birthday and Cowboy and Indian really don't know what to buy him as they considered a hat but Horse has a cupboard full. Suddenly, they get the idea of an outdoor barbecue and are in the process of ordering 50 bricks to construct Horse's present when Indian brings a cup of tea to his friend and rests with the handle on the 0 key so, rather than 50, they end up ordering 50,000,000 bricks.

Having constructed the barbecue, they hide the 49,999,950 of the bricks on top of their house which just proceeds to crush it in the middle of the night. This is only the beginning of their problems as, every time they begin to build a new house, the walls are mysteriously stolen in the middle of the night.

What follows is an adventure of epic proportions as Horse is desperate to get to his piano lesson at school as he is in love with the teacher, another horse called Madame Longrée but things keep getting in his way such as falling to the centre of the Earth, kleptomaniac amphibians and mad scientists who live in a giant penguin and fire giant snowballs around the globe.


This really isn't a film for people who like a coherent narrative with a proper arc, believable characters and realistic scenarios but, if you are able to put logic to one side for 80 minutes and just go with the images in front of you and don't mind maddeningly surrealist nonsense then you are likely to enjoy this. There is no shortage of amusing and completely off the wall humour and location changes that really don't make any sense at all and it almost feels as if the two filmmakers, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, wrote down every idea they had wanted to include in the TV show and decided to include all of them in this film.

This was longlisted for the Best Foreign Film award at the 2010 Oscars and it is great to see 2D stop motion animation being recognised and given such a DVD outing. I've also seen clips of this in the 'Autumn of Cinema' promotion at Cineworld which means that somewhere in the country it was given a theatrical outing. Of all of the great characters in A Town Called Panic (original title: Panique au village), the best is probably an enraged farmer called Steve who is always absolutely furious about the maddening events happening next door and the film is really worth seeing for that character alone.


The Disc

Extra Features
Sadly, there aren't a great deal of extra features, just a brief interview with Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar who talk about where the idea came from, the fact that they picked up the three 'characters' at random in a flea market and the various voices.

The Picture
This is never going to win any awards for its sheer visual brilliance (Avatar it ain't) but the stop motion animation is absolutely wonderful with these models, the sort of things that I used to play with as a child, walking on their bases, like the soldiers in the Toy Story films.

There are only a couple of occasions when CGI is employed and it fits in very well but somehow they managed to create fire, water and explosions by hand, animating these effects frame by frame in what must have been an absolutely painstaking process.


The Sound
A Town Called Panic keeps the original French soundtrack, in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo or 5.1 surround, with very good optional English subtitles which always translate Cheval as Horse and are reasonably faithful to the language (at least as far as I could tell) but the dialogue is delivered so quickly and in so many different voices that you need to work fairly hard to keep up with who is saying what.

Unsurprisingly, there is no score but there is some diegetic music which the characters either play on the piano -- an instrument that Horse wants to learn -- or is played at Horse's party at a deafening level.


Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed the short films, about 4-5 minutes each, on the Aardman's Darkside DVD I wasn't quite sure whether it would successfully make the transformation to a feature length film but my doubts were quickly erased when it became clear just how insane the whole scenario is and that A Town Called Panic doesn't follow the typical rules of filmmaking and jumping from place to place and person to person with reckless abandon which is all part of its charm.

If you've seen any of the shorts and liked them then this is a film definitely worth checking out but, if you are unsure, there are plenty of clips on YouTube so you can work out what you are letting yourself in for before deciding whether to rent or buy this DVD. I would recommend a rental before buying as it could be the sort of film that you would watch over and over again, particularly after a night out or when you have friends round or it could be the sort of film that you would watch once, decided it's complete nonsense, and then watch it again. I'm in the former category!