A Town Called Panic

A Town Called Panic

75 Minutes

Animation’s essential attractiveness is in its material reality. It evokes the image of the artist drawing, sculpting, rendering, painting and consequently draws the viewer’s mind to how films work mechanically, as series of successive images. Drawing attention to an invisible hand in this manner brings forward the actual act of conjuring a universe that constitutes filmmaking. At best, films are little hermetic universes of their own. A Town Called Panic is ridiculous and almost aggressively stupid at times, but it constitutes an act of creation of this scope. Light, fast, kind of insane; it evokes the imaginative play of childhood without compromising its adulthood. The narrative is loose, unhinged – it takes place in a world whose operative logic is the possibility of absurdity. This movie’s fine for kids, but it’s just perfect for adults; its loopy story and endearing characters, its willingness to frequently reinvent its own universe, and its from-the-toybox visual aesthetic results in something that has the transporting effect of feeling like it’s taking place within a mind at play. Why wouldn’t a small pond give way to a bizarre underwater version of the town above it? Why wouldn’t online shopping captivate a horse?

That Horse, voiced by co-writer/director Vincent Patar, is the hapless instigator of the film’s titular panic, the apparent brains of a household he shares with Cowboy (co-writer/director Stéphane Aubier) and Indian (Bruce Ellison). All of the characters in the film are molded off of the most archetypal toy forms you can imagine, but the world surrounding them is far beyond that, like the sets the kids in the commercials played on. Cowboy and Indian are essentially a pair of buffoonish kids who want to impress their friend and hero, the patriarchal, pipe-smoking Horse, with the perfect gift, a brick barbecue they want to build themselves. They sneak onto Horse’s computer to order supplies and accidentally hold down the zero key for too long, and within moments the town is flooded in bricks. If Toy Story captured a kid’s imagination picturing what his toys could be like when he wasn’t around, Panic is a film that captures, albeit with a slightly more misanthropic sense of humor, that kid’s imagination when caught in the middle of actually playing with them. The film maintains a madcap pace, and its earnest aspiration towards relentless craziness is really appreciated, but even at 75 minutes it manages to overstay its welcome a bit, occasionally taking too much lingering satisfaction in a gag or scenario that can’t quite carry the weight of that much time. Still, Panic is a genuinely unique and frequently hilarious film; I would have been grateful for it as a kid.

by Andrei Alupului