Top 25 Favourite Films: #18 A Town Called Panic (Dir. Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, 2010)
#18. A Town Called Panic. Directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, 2010
It is difficult to explain A Town Called Panic to the uninitiated. On the surface, it is an stop-motion animated fantasy film made by, and voiced entirely, by Belgians, based on a series created by co-directors Aubier and Patar. Our stars, three childrens' models-think of the type that British toymakers, uh, Britains used to make-, Cowboy (voiced by Aubier) Horse (Patar) and Indian (Bruce Ellison) go on an adventure, triggered by Cowboy and Indian's wellintentioned plans to build Horse a house, and leads them from their rural home to the centre of the earth, to frozen tundra, and even to another universe.
Peel back this delightfully childish story, however, and one reveals what may be, simply put, the maddest film ever made, a joyfully insane, manically energetic masterpiece that is as surreal as it is creative, and, though it's barely over an hour long, manages to feel like a film for everyone, at once wide-eyed and childishly imaginative, and gleefully, playfully subversive. A Town Called Panic, in short, is a film that is as close to returning to that era where we created our our stories with the toys around us as it is possible to be, but on the most grandiose of scales.
Of course, this being a big-screen adaption of a series whose history stretches back to 1991, a litlte backstory is needed. Starting life as a short directed by both Aubier and Patar, entitled Panic Au Village, and running less than four minutes, it eventually began to take shape as a series (eventually 20) 5 minute shorts involving the adventures of Cowboy, Indian and Horse, and even a Christmas special, both of which were handled outside the duo's native Belgium by Aardman Animations. Ironically, the legacy of Panique Au Village, at least in my native Britain, is the similarly styled adverts for milk brand, Cravendale, animated by the same team.
Indeed, the animated series that shares this film's name is pretty much a taste of what this film is; its episodes set up a surreal predicament, usually from the rivalry of squabbling, impulsive and rather childish Cowboy and Indian, and usually, at least partly, solved by Horse, whilst a series of side-characters look on or occasionally assist, from shouting farmer, Steven to a bizarre series of one-off appearances. Thus, the series flicks back and forth, often at breakneck speeds, between beautifully odd visuals and slapstick only heightened in its comedy by the admittedly, and entirely deliberately, clumsy animation, featuring objects that are either oddly idiosyncractic-the world's cars and a colossal, winding piano in a character's office , for example, or comically oversized, from pencils to waffles to the landscape of the area.
Yet, in its simple, almost naive presentation, A Town Called Panic's trio feels like every great comedy trio, from Moe, Curly and Larry to Groucho, Chico and Harpo rolled into one; the smart, sophisticated adult, prone to violence, the cowardly if occasionally mature troublemaker, and the perpetual, almost beauifatic child, who is reckless, childish and inevitably gets into scrapes with his partner in crime. Even in the simpler scenes, when our trio are simply interacting, rather than reacting to, running from or doing battle with all manner of strange and surreal figures, the comedic back and forth in, what after all, is subtitled Belgian-unlike the series, this film has no dub-is at such speed, both in terms of verbal and physical humour, that it's practically whiplash inducing.
When the film's truly surreal moments occur, however, it is like nothing else on cinema, a speed-freaked, and extremely potent mix of similarly surreal (and very much made on drugs) Dougal and the Blue Cat, the Roadrunnner cartoons, the strangest moments of practically every stop-start animated series or film ever made-the polar-set section has more than a passing to the utterly fear-inducing episode of beloved Finnish series Pingu in which a horrifying walrus appears in a dream, whilst the speed and chaos of the film cannot help but remind oneself of the more action-packed parts of films as diverse as The Lego Movie and Mad Max Fury Road, where the film seems to keep itself going by pure momentum, even as quieter, more romantic moments between Horse and his girlfriend see the film adopt a more relaxed pace.
With Horse's birthday leading to our other heroes panicking after forgetting, so they plan to surprirse him with a barbeque, but, after ordering far too many bricks-the sequence in which they first appear after a catalogue of errors is one of the single funniest moments in the entire film, as our heroes begin to slowly realise, brick stack by brick stack exactly what they've wrought upon their small town, and begin to panic. Horse's birthday follows, and, inevitably, the bricks, which are seen, in one of the film's rare longshots, parked on top of the house, in comic fashion, cause it to collapse, and our heroes to be forced to escape, only for the bricks, in one of the film's rare quiet moments to disappear into the earth.
The morning after, with the chaos revealled, and a comically colossal bill owing, our heroes are forced to work out a solution, only for the remains of their house to be stolen in the middle of the night by mysterious figures. Eventually ending up in the house of a bear, our heroes eventually plummet into the centre of the earth, and what follows, in simple terms, is complete joyful insanity, with all manner of surreal, hilarious and bizarre things happening to, and around, our heroes as they voyage from the bowels of the earth to frozen wasteland, in which they are lost in a blizzard and menaced by a colossal robotic penguin, which actually turns out to be an almost Nick Park esque giant robot, complete with scientist crew who menace what seems like most of the world with their creation, to ending up at the bottom of the sea in another dimension to battle those who have stolen their house, whilst their friends at home begin to realise they are missing, before a breakneck, almost manic finale throws all the disparate elements back together.
But above everything, A Town Called Panic is, simply put, one of the funniest, sweetest and strangest films ever made, beautifully eccentric in its toyland world, soundtracked by messy Belgian punk and softly plucked ukulele, a world in a bizarre series of scales in which objects are rendered in what, simply put, is the funniest possible way, with a cast as weird as they are memorable, and where the crudeness of animation is an asset, not a hinderance. In a way that no other film, has ever quite captured, this is a film about childhood and imagination, in all its wide-eyed wonder, cheerfully naive excitement and breakneck comic sensibility. It's as as damn close as you'll ever get to being inside another person's childhood imagination, and it is nothing short of a masterpiece. .
It is difficult to explain A Town Called Panic to the uninitiated. On the surface, it is an stop-motion animated fantasy film made by, and voiced entirely, by Belgians, based on a series created by co-directors Aubier and Patar. Our stars, three childrens' models-think of the type that British toymakers, uh, Britains used to make-, Cowboy (voiced by Aubier) Horse (Patar) and Indian (Bruce Ellison) go on an adventure, triggered by Cowboy and Indian's wellintentioned plans to build Horse a house, and leads them from their rural home to the centre of the earth, to frozen tundra, and even to another universe.
Peel back this delightfully childish story, however, and one reveals what may be, simply put, the maddest film ever made, a joyfully insane, manically energetic masterpiece that is as surreal as it is creative, and, though it's barely over an hour long, manages to feel like a film for everyone, at once wide-eyed and childishly imaginative, and gleefully, playfully subversive. A Town Called Panic, in short, is a film that is as close to returning to that era where we created our our stories with the toys around us as it is possible to be, but on the most grandiose of scales.
Of course, this being a big-screen adaption of a series whose history stretches back to 1991, a litlte backstory is needed. Starting life as a short directed by both Aubier and Patar, entitled Panic Au Village, and running less than four minutes, it eventually began to take shape as a series (eventually 20) 5 minute shorts involving the adventures of Cowboy, Indian and Horse, and even a Christmas special, both of which were handled outside the duo's native Belgium by Aardman Animations. Ironically, the legacy of Panique Au Village, at least in my native Britain, is the similarly styled adverts for milk brand, Cravendale, animated by the same team.
Indeed, the animated series that shares this film's name is pretty much a taste of what this film is; its episodes set up a surreal predicament, usually from the rivalry of squabbling, impulsive and rather childish Cowboy and Indian, and usually, at least partly, solved by Horse, whilst a series of side-characters look on or occasionally assist, from shouting farmer, Steven to a bizarre series of one-off appearances. Thus, the series flicks back and forth, often at breakneck speeds, between beautifully odd visuals and slapstick only heightened in its comedy by the admittedly, and entirely deliberately, clumsy animation, featuring objects that are either oddly idiosyncractic-the world's cars and a colossal, winding piano in a character's office , for example, or comically oversized, from pencils to waffles to the landscape of the area.
Yet, in its simple, almost naive presentation, A Town Called Panic's trio feels like every great comedy trio, from Moe, Curly and Larry to Groucho, Chico and Harpo rolled into one; the smart, sophisticated adult, prone to violence, the cowardly if occasionally mature troublemaker, and the perpetual, almost beauifatic child, who is reckless, childish and inevitably gets into scrapes with his partner in crime. Even in the simpler scenes, when our trio are simply interacting, rather than reacting to, running from or doing battle with all manner of strange and surreal figures, the comedic back and forth in, what after all, is subtitled Belgian-unlike the series, this film has no dub-is at such speed, both in terms of verbal and physical humour, that it's practically whiplash inducing.
When the film's truly surreal moments occur, however, it is like nothing else on cinema, a speed-freaked, and extremely potent mix of similarly surreal (and very much made on drugs) Dougal and the Blue Cat, the Roadrunnner cartoons, the strangest moments of practically every stop-start animated series or film ever made-the polar-set section has more than a passing to the utterly fear-inducing episode of beloved Finnish series Pingu in which a horrifying walrus appears in a dream, whilst the speed and chaos of the film cannot help but remind oneself of the more action-packed parts of films as diverse as The Lego Movie and Mad Max Fury Road, where the film seems to keep itself going by pure momentum, even as quieter, more romantic moments between Horse and his girlfriend see the film adopt a more relaxed pace.
With Horse's birthday leading to our other heroes panicking after forgetting, so they plan to surprirse him with a barbeque, but, after ordering far too many bricks-the sequence in which they first appear after a catalogue of errors is one of the single funniest moments in the entire film, as our heroes begin to slowly realise, brick stack by brick stack exactly what they've wrought upon their small town, and begin to panic. Horse's birthday follows, and, inevitably, the bricks, which are seen, in one of the film's rare longshots, parked on top of the house, in comic fashion, cause it to collapse, and our heroes to be forced to escape, only for the bricks, in one of the film's rare quiet moments to disappear into the earth.
The morning after, with the chaos revealled, and a comically colossal bill owing, our heroes are forced to work out a solution, only for the remains of their house to be stolen in the middle of the night by mysterious figures. Eventually ending up in the house of a bear, our heroes eventually plummet into the centre of the earth, and what follows, in simple terms, is complete joyful insanity, with all manner of surreal, hilarious and bizarre things happening to, and around, our heroes as they voyage from the bowels of the earth to frozen wasteland, in which they are lost in a blizzard and menaced by a colossal robotic penguin, which actually turns out to be an almost Nick Park esque giant robot, complete with scientist crew who menace what seems like most of the world with their creation, to ending up at the bottom of the sea in another dimension to battle those who have stolen their house, whilst their friends at home begin to realise they are missing, before a breakneck, almost manic finale throws all the disparate elements back together.
But above everything, A Town Called Panic is, simply put, one of the funniest, sweetest and strangest films ever made, beautifully eccentric in its toyland world, soundtracked by messy Belgian punk and softly plucked ukulele, a world in a bizarre series of scales in which objects are rendered in what, simply put, is the funniest possible way, with a cast as weird as they are memorable, and where the crudeness of animation is an asset, not a hinderance. In a way that no other film, has ever quite captured, this is a film about childhood and imagination, in all its wide-eyed wonder, cheerfully naive excitement and breakneck comic sensibility. It's as as damn close as you'll ever get to being inside another person's childhood imagination, and it is nothing short of a masterpiece. .
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