A Town Called Panic

Perhaps you remember the Cravendale milk adverts in which a set of farmyard toys are amusingly animated to display their allegiance to a particular brand of milk. These were made by animators Vincent Patar and Stephane Aubier, based on a series of short animations called A Town Called Panic, which were similarly mental. This is a feature length version of those animations.

The basic idea here seems to be to create the kinds of surreal adventures that kids of about age six have their toys go through. A cowboy (called Cowboy), an indian (called Indian) and a Horse (called Horse) live together and have a series of misadventures, mostly caused Cowboy and Indian doing ill-advised things while Horse (the brains of the operation) is otherwise occupied. It all starts when Cowboy and Indian attempt to order 50 bricks online, to build Horse a barbeque for his birthday, only they accidentally order 50 million bricks. This leads to their house getting crushed by 50 million bricks. They attempt to rebuild, but every time they do, the house gets nicked overnight. Which leads them to track down the culprits, which leads them on a subterranean chase after a bunch of weird fish-men.

It goes on from there and gets odder. If you've ever tried to tell a story to a young child, and asked them to contribute weird ideas to incorporate into the story, you'll have come up with something similar yourself. It's very inventive, in the sense that it's continually inventive. I wouldn't have said that it's frequently laugh out loud funny, but rather there's a constant stream of odd ideas, and amusing twist. The animation style is deliberately crude, and often there are great little moments where that is highlighted in amusing ways. I wouldn't say that it's exactly genius, but it's certainly above and beyond the norm, and you kind of stagger out at the end, blinking, wondering what just happened.

If the thing has a real weakness, it's the voice talent. In that the main characters all seem to shout at each other all the time. I imagine in a five minute cartoon, that's all highly amusing. Over 75 minutes, it's kind of wearing.

Overall, though, it's very entertaining to have someone basically be insane at you for 75 minutes. It doesn't let up, and there's never a dull moment. It's not going to make you think very hard, or leave you with a deep emotional message. On the other hand, it does have a giant robot penguin operated by three mad scientists, and for no readily explained reason. And what's not to like about that?