A Town Called Panic (2009)

A Town Called Panic is a 2009 stop-motion animated film directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar. It is a spin-off from the popular Belgian TV series of the same name, which was produced in 2000. There are a lot of other animated and comedy shows I recognised in A Town Called Panic. It felt a bit like The Magic Roundabout, also The Mighty Boosh, South Park, and that plasticine-based cartoon from the late 1970s, The Red and the Blue. It reminded me of a lot of other things, but more than that A Town Called Panic also felt kind of unique. It’s like those other shows in that strange way in that each of those shows don’t feel like any other shows. Does that make a lot of sense? Probably not. That’s OK, however, because neither does a A Town Called Panic.

Horse, Cowboy and Indian – they’re played by small children’s toys of a horse, a cowboy and an indian – live together in a house in the two-house village of Panic. The other house is owned by a farmer who shouts all the time with a herd of animals who take music lessons from another horse who lives in the next town. When Cowboy and Indian discover it is Horse’s birthday, they decide to build him a brick barbeque as a present. They order bricks over the internet, and an unfortunate typo sees them accidentally receive 50 million bricks. They try to hide them from Horse by balancing them on the roof, which only serves to demolish their house, and when Horse tried to rebuild the house, he finds the walls keep getting stolen by fish people.

That’s about the first 20 minutes. There’s another 50 minutes after that, which involve journeys to the centre of the Earth, more fish people, parallel universes, mad scientists and snowball-throwing giant robots shaped like penguins. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of movie, I think you need to loosen up a little in your life and watch a wider range of movies.