Like South Park was for animation, only without as much profanity.
Driving home from the screening of Belgium’s A Town Called Panic at The Dallas International Film Festival, I was unsure of what I had just experienced. Based on a popular short series, A Town Called Panic chronicles the stop-motion adventures of Cowboy, Indian, and Horse in the house that they share in their small village. You know those small cowboy and Indian figures, like in The Indian in the Cupboard? Cowboy, Indian, and Horse look like that, small standing base and all. The plot is all over the place and the humor is childish, but in this case, that’s not a bad thing.
Horse is clearly the most intelligent of the three roommates. He has his own bedroom, his own shower, and he reads the newspaper. Cowboy and Indian are the pranksters who have happened to forget Horse’s birthday. In a frantic last minute attempt to make Horse a barbecue for his birthday, they mistakenly order 50 million bricks from the Internet instead of the 50 bricks required in their blueprints. The bricks are delivered immediately, but while Horse is out of the house to pick up neighbor Steven’s animals from their music lessons, and Cowboy and Indian stack the remaining bricks on top of their house to hide them. Under the weight of the bricks, the house comes crashing down in the middle of the night and it is when Horse makes Cowboy and Indian rebuild the house that the zany action really gets underway.
There really is no way to explain how Horse, Cowboy and Indian end up in a giant robotic penguin in the North Pole; or how they end up under the sea in a battle with fish-people; or how the sea is mysteriously linked to the pond in neighbor Steven’s front yard. But rest assured it is all an enormously entertaining, laugh out loud funny (and even loudly stomp your feet on the floor funny, according to the gentleman seated in front of me) stop-motion animated sight to behold. From the Aardman Studios who brought you the family friendly Wallace & Gromit series, A Town Called Panic is stop-motion for grown-ups – like South Park was for animation, only without as much profanity – and a movie that is not to be missed.
Director: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar
Notable Cast: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Bruce Ellison
Writer(s): Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar
