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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
A TOWN CALLED PANIC
Filmmakers Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s film is as delightfully unpolished and uncommercial as Disney Pixar’s Cars isn’t. The filmmakers found their characters in a store toy bin—the cheap plastic figures with little ovals between their feet you find in dioramas—and then set them against handmade cardboard-and-clay backdrops. The stop-motion animation gives a joyously slapdash and spontaneous effect where even the characters’ walking makes you giggle. The plot, such as it is, involves three friends in a rural town somewhere in France. Horse is a horse, Cowboy is a cowboy, and Indian is a Native American. Cowboy and Indian decide to build a brick barbecue for Horse’s birthday, but through an Internet error, they end up ordering 50 million bricks rather than the intended 50. The result has massive and obvious ramifications on their bucolic little farm village, which I won’t spoil for you here, since it’s of little import anyway. Eschewing the lesson-based, ends-tied structure of today’s animated films, Panic plays like a child’s play session come to life, but with an adult sense of whimsy and the absurd. It somehow finds a way to be successful without celebrity voiceovers or a signature Randy Newman song. The outcome is a film completely unencumbered by traditional screenwriting rules, or even laws of nature, a controlled chaos careening wildly through adventures in which literally anything could happen. Given how much there is going on visually on the screen, Panic’s subtitles could have been more legible in certain scenes, but they are a better solution than dubbing in English. The bizarre (to an American) spectacle of a Cowboy and Indian shouting in French, and the droll European urbanity of the characters only serve to make the film feel more entertainingly odd. The only downside to the subtitles is that young English-speaking kids, who might otherwise enjoy the film’s sensibility, have no way to fully understand the action.
That said, A Town Called Panic isn’t really a children’s film per
se—it’s a film channeling a child’s unbridled, unplanned imagination,
executed in one of the most difficult and meticulous mediums available,
hand-animated stop motion. Doug Yellin
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Recent advances in animation have changed the way we look at the genre.
With Pixar’s rich unreality, once obvious artifice now blends into worlds which are completely immersive and plausible.
James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar takes the technology further,
effectively digitizing and re-animating the performances of real actors
in ways that will redefine where the line between an animated and
live-action film resides. A Town Called Panic rejects all of
these advances and hops up and down on them.