Panique au village (2009)
Directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar

Film Review

It says something about the current crop of Hollywood A-listers that they now have to compete with cheap-looking plastic figurines with appalling diction and stiffer limb movement than a rat in the advanced stages of rigor mortis.  Panique au village (a.k.a. A Town Called Panic) may look as if it was cobbled together by a gang of druggie arts students after a successful raid on a Plasticine factory but it is an absolute marvel, just about the funniest and most original animated feature in years.  Belgium's answer to Toy Story, it is the kind of surreal oddity which, once seen, is never forgotten, as much a treat for children as it is for the adults.  It is surprising that the film doesn't come with a health warning because it is possible to laugh yourself into a coma as you watch the weird exploits of the plastic protagonists as they bounce from one insane situation to another like balls in a pinball machine.

Panique au village started out as an animated television series of twenty five-minute episodes, first broadcast in France on Canal+ in 2003.  The national and international popularity of the series led its creators, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, to develop it into a full-blown feature with a more elaborate plot and far more spectacular visuals than could have been achieved in Panique's original homespun format.  It's not hard to see where the strongest influences come from: Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park and Terry Gilliam's animated work on Monty Python's Flying Circus.  Yet, whilst the points of reference are easily detected, Panique au village quickly establishes its own identity, its low-tech bricolage artistry and brain-contorting absurdity giving it a charm and poetry of a genuinely unique character.

The film may look superficially cheap and cheerful but look a little closer and you will be amazed at how much detail there is in it, in both the script and the effects.  It took 260 days to shoot the film, using the painstaking stop motion techniques pioneered by the effects guru Willis H. O'Brien in the 1933 version of King Kong (and subsequently turned into an art in its own right by Ray Harryhausen).  Stop motion animation has been rendered virtually obsolete thanks to computer generated gimmickry, yet it has an authenticity and charm that today's more polished effects can never quite seem to match. Anyone who was weaned on children's TV shows in the 1970s which used the technique extensively risks being carried away on a wave of nostalgia by this film.  Watching it is like going up into the attic and uncovering an old tea chest filled with long-forgotten toys, all impregnated with childhood memories.

The effects are certainly a strong selling point, but what makes Panique au village such a sublime piece of entertainment is the mind-blowing ingenuity of its plot.  It feels like the distillation of ever sci-fi/fantasy film ever made, with a few gallons of classic rom-com thrown into the mix.  In what other film does an internet purchase error result in a journey to the centre of the Earth that mysteriously ends in Antarctica, where a group of evil scientists are testing a snowball missile system in a laboratory disguised as a giant penguin?  Where else will you come across a farmyard pond masquerading as a portal to an underwater world inhabited by devious wall-stealing fish people?  Or a posh music school for animals run by a romantically inclined mare?   The main joy of Panique au village is that it constantly takes us by surprise, zipping from one bout of creative lunacy to another with such rapidity that it is a struggle to keep up with it.  The film's episodic structure naturally allows it to be watched in multiple sittings of ten to fifteen minute durations, and maybe this is the way to get the most out of it.  Watching the film in its entirety in one go feels like a gluttonous mental binge that risks exploding your cranium.  Some things are best consumed in moderation.

Without subtitles, the (heavily Belgian accented) dialogue would be virtually unintelligible to a non-Francophone audience (and even then it is mostly nonsensical).  As in Jacques Tati's films, the dialogue is pretty superfluous anyway, just another humorous cue intended to express the mood of the protagonists rather than help support the logic-defying narrative.  Of course, it's nice to hear actors of the quality of Benoît Poelvoorde, Jeanne Balibar and Bouli Lanners lending their vocal talents to the stiff plastic characters, but what matters most is the endless stream of visual gags that pummel our retinas, not the high-pitched cacophony that tickles our ear drums.

And has cinema ever given us a more improbable dramatis personae than what we find here - cheap plastic toys that look as if they have just fallen out of a cornflakes packet?   Unlikely as it may seem, we soon warm to the odd ensemble that includes (1) a cowardly cowboy with an I.Q. in the low teens, (2) an accident-prone Indian who thinks he is bright but isn't and (3) the erudite horse who tries, in vain, to keep the latter two in order whilst pursuing a discrete love affair with his music teacher (another horse).  Cowboy and Indian form an odd kind of Laurel and Hardy tribute act, with Horse, the equine world's answer to Cary Grant (or is it Robert De Niro?), their reluctant minder.  They may lack the mobility of other popular animated creations (such as Wallace and Gromit), but this zany threesome soon take on a life of their own and we soon forget they are just injection moulded lumps of plastic.

Panique au village is an unbridled comedy delight, 75 minutes of escapist lunacy that is almost lethal in its hilarity.  Who needs high grade hallucinogenic drugs when you can sit and watch something as totally unhinged and perception-altering as this?  Next to this dose of industrial strength surrealist anarchy, The Magic Roundabout (another Francophone creation) would pass as a hard-hitting social realist drama.  From the land of Tintin and Spirou comes the weirdest movie experience yet.  As someone once famously said: Ne panique pas!  If ever your village is threatened by overly obliging websites, Atlantean wall rustlers or snowball hurling giant penguins, you'll know what to do: make friends with a canny plastic horse and hope for the best...

Film Synopsis

Cowboy and Indian live happily together in a house in the country with their friend Horse.  To celebrate Horse's birthday, Cowboy and Indian agree to organise a barbecue, but instead of the 50 bricks they ordered on the internet they somehow end up with 50 trillion.  Before they know it, Horse's house is buried beneath a mountain of bricks!  But as Cowboy and Indian attempt to rebuild the house, some nasty so-and-so comes along in the night and steals their walls.  Following the mysterious thief, the three friends end up on a boulder that is in free fall towards the centre of the Earth.  They escape certain death to find themselves in a snowy wilderness where they encounter a group of mad scientists who intend to fire gigantic snowballs at their village...