The madness of stop-motion animation is due to it being a very ‘hands on’ art that seems to possess its creators, and the smaller the out of scale models the larger the wacky story. In A Town Called Panic (Panique au village) directors Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar make a crazy fast, kooky film; you need to see it in slow motion to see the contortions, contraptions, and mayhem of firing swordfish, pigs and cows as weapons. Unlike Wallace and Gromit great facial expressions these are tiny figurines like you had as a kid with the platformed feet that don’t move and their entire bodies have to move to show action. The Belgian production was designed for very short TV shorts, and I can see how the technique and style might work in that format, but feature full length it almost becomes overwhelming.
It is a story as crazy as any child’s imagination with a horse, a farmer, a policeman, a mail man, an Indian, a cowboy, a Ton of bricks, and a beautiful music teacher named Madame Longray (Jeanne Balibar). They all live in a very small village together, the mail gets delivered, they wake up with the rooster, and jump in the shower with their clothes on, shout at each other all the time, and then sit down to read the paper and drink coffee.
On this particular day it is Horse’s (Vincent Patar) birthday, and Cowboy (Stephane Aubier) and Indian (Bruce Ellison) have forgotten. They decide a good birthday gift would be a brick barbeque; Indian got the idea looking out the window at a pig and it reminds him of barbequing a pig on a spit. Cowboy and Indian decide to order some bricks over the Internet and they accidentally order millions, which are delivered, and in order to hide them Cowboy and Indian decide to pile them all on top of the house. The house of course collapses and they end up having to live in Steven the farmer’s (Benoit Poelvoorde) barn.
Farmer is the craziest, loudest most irritating of the whole cast, which probably shouldn’t be a surprise when you consider the voice was done by the very same man who played Ben the serial killer in the notorious faux-documentary Man Bites Dog. When they try to rebuild their walls they find that someone is stealing them as every morning the work they have done is gone. A fish man character named Gerard (Frederic Jannin) and his buddies have been coming up through the pond and stealing the walls to bring to their parallel undersea world. So the trio of Horse, Cowboy and Indian set out to get their bricks back finding themselves at the centre of the earth, the artic, and in the sea.
Actually writing this story down strikes you of just how strange it really is. If you sat and recorded the actual stories that kids play out themselves, it would be no less surreal. It is not a beautiful Tim Burton world but rather a frenzy of shuffled pieces where absolutely anything goes. Some will find it very funny and others will not at all. It is hard to believe they are only tiny pieces sometimes.
