'A Town Called Panic' is a surreal stop-motion animated adventure

A Town Called Panic.jpg"A Town Called Panic"
What would you do if you wanted to order 50 bricks on the Internet to build a barbecue for your friend's birthday, but due to a comical error, you receive 50 million bricks via a seemingly endless fleet of delivery trucks that clog traffic to and from your village?
Panic may be an option. But in "A Town Called Panic," it's the only option. This stop-motion-animation film proceeds with the breathless pace its title asserts, delighting us with a deluge of inspired silliness. Characters populate the narrative, but the primary screen presence is lunacy, which infects every aspect of the production.

Summarizing the plot seems pointless -- it would be a rambling run-on sentence, and by the end of it, we'd be winded and sweating. So I'll simplify: "Panic" is a surreal-ish adventure, with Horse (voice of Vincent Patar), Cowboy (Stephane Aubier) and Indian (Bruce Ellison) at the eye of the storm. Strange it is that an American trio such as this would be living in the French countryside; stranger still, that they speak in French (with English subtitles) with helium-squeaky voices. They are modeled after cheap plastic-toy figurines with the little bases beneath their feet.

'A Town Called Panic'

Not rated
Voice cast: Stephane Aubier, Bruce Ellison, Vincent Patar, Jeanne Balibar
Directors: Stephane Aubier, Vincent Patar
Run time: 75 minutes

Living next door are the farmer Steven (Benoit Poelvoorde) and his wife Janine (Veronique Dumont), who makes him a giant piece of toast for breakfast every morning. Their animals go to music school, run by beautiful, cultured horse Madame Longray (Jeanne Balibar). Horse has eyes for Longray. Steven loves his tractor. Janine is a toast master.

The haplessly infantile Cowboy and Indian initiate the brick incident, which affects all characters, and sets into motion a manic series of events taking place in green plasticine barnyards, underground caverns, snow-swept blizzardscapes and literally upside-down undersea dwellings. Walls are stolen, piano lessons missed, giant mechanical penguin-tanks deployed.

I'm assuming Belgian filmmakers/animators Aubier and Pater were thrilled to translate their series of made-for-TV "Panic" shorts (you can find them on YouTube) into a broader-scope feature film. Their creativity is as relentless as the film's hyper-caffeinated energy. We've recently seen equally inspired stop-motion visual artistry in Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and Henry Selick's "Coraline," and the different degrees of texture within the medium are amazing; these films are hand-crafted, and wonderful for it.

"Panic," however, doesn't share storytelling characteristics with its stylistic brethren. The film is looniness for its own sake, and never pretends to be anything but the pure essence of nonsense, and good, clean fun. It's only applicable ideology is what not to do with 50 million bricks.

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