Customer Reviews

A Town Called Panic

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

One of my earliest memories is of sitting outside in the snow and a big jacket, with my Playskool plastic barn and assorted barn animals, toy cars, soldiers and such. I spent hours, everywhere, arranging these figures, hurling them through the sky, burying them under rocks, occasionally melting or dissecting them, inventing crazy situations where they could interact, play, attack and relax. None of them, I expect, were as exhilaratingly intense or as laugh-out-loud-funny as the bizarre adventures that directors Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar invent for Cowboy, Indian, Horse and their assorted cohorts in this whimsical and clever stop-motion animated film.

Cowboy and Indian are careless and carefree. They live together in a big house with the somewhat more dignified Horse, who enjoys chocolate-covered hay and has a thing for the beautiful music teacher, Ms. Longree. It's Horse's birthday, and Cowboy and Indian forgot to get a present, so they get frantic. They decide to build him a brick barbecue, but they don't have enough bricks, so they order some online but instead of the 50 they need they accidentally order 500000000000000000000 or some such ridiculous number of bricks. Towering the extra bricks on top of the house turns out not to be such a good idea; and when they try to rebuild their broken house out of stray bricks, the funny thing is that someone keeps stealing their walls, and now they all have to work together to resolve the mystery.

I saw this with my kids, but in a theater where there were mostly adults, and everyone was busting up at the absurdly over-the-top scenarios that felt like the spontaneous result of whimsical and inventive storytellers with lots of plastic toys at their disposal. It's more lo-fi than, say, Wallace & Gromit or Coraline, and it's less refined and clever than Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, but it's more fun than I've had in the theater in a long time. Highly recommended for adults who haven't forgotten everything about childhood, and for children who won't be traumatized by either subtitles or surrealistic silliness (including a night of drunken carousing on the part of plastic toys, that ends with Farmer plastered in a jealous rage, ready to punch the lights out of Postman for asking his wife to dance).

My wife and one of my kids missed this in the theaters, and I can't wait for the dvd release to bring it home for all to enjoy. I would take this any day over most of the animated dreck that comes and goes in the local movieplexes. Great stuff for lovers of inventive cinema.

VERY RANDOM this little movie is! The characters are all toys and not even toys that necessarily go together all that well. For example, the plastic farmer's wife is quite a bit bigger than the plastic farmer. It's almost as though someone dug through his toy box and created a movie with what he found there. There was never a dull moment. We certainly didn't know what to expect next. Spurious bursts of laughter were breaking out around us from fellow theater patrons throughout.

"A Town Called Panic" is clever, creative, cute, bizarre, silly entertainment appropriate for a rainy day or after dark family outing or even a date night, especially if it can be seen at an inexpensive theater. In my family, the 5 of us range in age from 14-60 and we all enjoyed it. The dialog is in French, but there are English subtitles. I think we left the theater sort of shaking our heads, wondering WHAT exactly WAS that we'd just seen, but then we rehashed various things all the way home, laughing as we did! It's been a few weeks since we saw it and we're still laughing about a couple things. We plan to see it again someday and perhaps even buy our own copy. Random. Yes, random.

My kids love Wallace and Grommit. So when I saw this on the shelf I thought it might be worth a try. I had never heard of it before. The first viewing of the movie was with an eight year old boy, 2 five year old boys and 3 grown ups. My eight year old son provided the subtitle translation to the youngest viewers. I'm not kidding when I say that there was spontaneous laughter from ALL age groups at the SAME time. This little film is VERY VERY FUNNY. It will suck you in parents, don't think you can put this on for your kids and turn away, it will certainly get your attention. I thoroughly recommend this movie. I am going to have to buy it. It has been requested everyday since renting. Love this movie.

Very simple, but dear god is this a delightful nugget of creative randomness. Simply marvelous and a joy to watch. It touches on that little spot in your imagination back when you didn't care that you had your Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles toys show up to help your G.I. Joes toys out of some crazy scheme thought up by your Skeletor toy

My 12 & 14 year old kids laughed out loud when first watching this movie. This is unlike anything else they have every seen. It reminds me of old time Gumby animated shows. But the story, characters, voices are so much better. There are so many things out of left field with this little flick, you never know what's going to happen next. Good for both boys and girls. Ages 8-14 I think. There's a lot going on throughout this movie, so multiple viewings is a must. The only thing kids might not be used to is the subtitles. But mine have watched all the fun Japanese animes and are used to them. And maybe they pick up a little French here and there... C'est la vie!

This is intentionally low tech animation of a high order.

A series of absurd, barely connected story-lines shapes this visit to a
high energy stop-motion animation world, where the characters all move
around just fine, thank you, regardless of the fact that they mostly
have plastic bases to which their feet are welded. There's something of
old, silent film slapstick here, along with a Monty Python sense of the
humor of weirdness.

On the other hand, I found it a bit hit and miss. There were certainly
many sections that I found entertaining and wonderful, but there were
some lulls as well. Some who are familiar with the film's origins (a
series of 5-10 minute shorts made for Belgian TV) felt it played better
in smaller doses, and I can see that.

But still, this is a very inventive, fun, one-of-a-kind film, and
that's always to be embraced and applauded.

This is the perfect movie to have in the house to break out when you need to jolly up. It's quirky, crazy, and insane. I can't wait to watch it again and again and again. It's worth having a special party just to share it with your favorite friends.

This movie never gets old, and it gets funnier every time we watch it. I can say that you've never seen a movie like this; it seems like a short animated feature that would have been on Pee Wee's Playhouse, but one you never want to end. The fact that the film is in French actually makes it even more enjoyable- the voices are part of the magic of the whole experience of this movie. It's a refreshing departure from the typical slick CG movies aimed at the 'family market' in many ways; the fact that it was made in Europe really shines through in all the best ways. Whether you need a movie for your kids or just for the kid in you, you'll love 'A Town Called Panic'

This French-language film appeals to the 8-year-old in each of us, that child who spent hours in the back yard playing with little plastic figurines and Legos, making up absurd adventures for disparate characters whose only common characteristic was their presence in the same toybox. These whimsically plotted stories turned on a dime and marched off to the bottom of the ocean or the north pole or the center of the earth or outer space without a thought to rhyme or reason. Their anarchic energy and utter goofiness was their raison d'être, and so it is with this crudely-animated tale of a cowboy, an Indian, and a horse. It produced silly grins on the faces of my middle-schoolers, and the lack of direction to the plot as it bounced like a pinball from one surreal event to the next bothered them not a whit.

I'm no curmudgeon, but the randomness and plotlessness bothered me. If the stop-motion visuals were more artfully executed, or if the characters had any depth to them, or if they had been voiced by actors who didn't continually scream and shout, "A Town Called Panic" might have proved interesting to an adult. But this was no "Toy Story" (1, 2, or 3), no "Wallace & Gromit." Pixar and Aardman understand the sophistication that makes a family film appeal to all generations, but this movie aims squarely for (and scores with) children who just want the world to be as crazy and chaotic as their endlessly inventive imaginations. So if you have young kids who want to giggle, or if you and your friends plan on getting high, this feature is a can't-miss recommendation for movie night.

Check out the trailer on the product page. It lasts a minute and a half. Then ask yourself if you're really ready to sign up for a full 75 minutes of this kind of frenzied wackiness. A house crushed by 50 billion bricks? Check. A game of cards while falling into a pit of lava? Sure. A battle between a wooly mammoth and a giant penguin-shaped tank? You got it. An amphibious chase featuring barracudas and swordfish and pigs and cows? But of course. A music school swept away by a tsunami? That can be arranged, too. You want full-tilt kinetic mayhem? (I'll bet your kids do.) Well, here it is!

What a gem of a little movie - something here for everyone. I LOVED IT!!!! One of those times where you just know you will watch a movie over and over again and never really catch it all - fresh every time. It hit me like a ton of bricks! Vive la France, and cowboy, indian, horse and his ladylove too!