A Town Called Panic (2009)
A Town Called Panic arrives from a corner of European animation that rarely gets much attention on this side of the Channel: the Belgian tradition of wilfully odd, low-budget, high-energy filmmaking that seems entirely unbothered by what anyone else is doing. The film grew out of a television series of the same name, created by the directing duo Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, which ran on Canal+ and later RTBF from the early 2000s. The feature version, co-written with Vincent Tavier and produced across Belgium, France and Luxembourg through a clutch of smaller independent outfits including La Parti Production and Made in Productions, arrived at Cannes in 2009 in the Un Certain Regard section, where it won the Jury Prize. That festival recognition helped push what might otherwise have remained a niche Belgian oddity into something approaching genuine international visibility, and it has since accumulated exactly the kind of slow-burn cult reputation that suits it perfectly.
The premise is as stripped-back as the materials used to realise it: Cowboy and Indian, flatmates and housemates to the long-suffering Horse, attempt to organise a birthday gift and immediately make everything catastrophically worse. What follows involves increasingly improbable geography, truly extraordinary quantities of building materials, and a plot that cheerfully ignores the normal rules of cause and effect. Aubier and Patar voice Cowboy and Indian respectively, with Bruce Ellison providing the put-upon Horse, while Jeanne Balibar and Bouli Lanners round out a small but committed voice cast. Balibar in particular brings a strange, dry charm to her supporting role that fits the film's deadpan register rather well. For anyone who has enjoyed other European animated features from around the same period, see also my thoughts on Ernest & Celestine and The Secret of Kells, both of which sit in that same broad tradition of non-Hollywood animation finding its own distinctive shape and voice.
The animation technique is worth pausing on, because it is central to everything the film is doing. Aubier and Patar work with cheap, off-the-shelf plastic toy figurines, the kind you might find in a box at a car boot sale, rigid and fixed-expression, mounted on pins and moved by hand against painted sets. The figures cannot emote in the conventional sense, which means the humour has to come entirely from timing, framing, voice performance and sheer momentum. Editor Peter Bernaers, cutting across a runtime of just 75 minutes, keeps the pace at something close to controlled hysteria, the kind of cutting that never lets a joke settle long enough to go flat. The score, composed jointly by French Cowboy and Mathias Malzieu, is loose and cartoonish in the best sense: vaguely Western in places, occasionally absurdist, always slightly out of step with what you might expect, which is exactly in keeping with the film's general attitude toward convention. The cinematography is not credited, but the visual approach is consistent: bright primary colours, flat and slightly cramped framing, a look that is polished but deliberately lo-fi, matching the handmade aesthetic of the figurines themselves. I also reviewed Chicken Run, which occupies very different stop-motion territory but shares that same sense of filmmakers completely committed to making their chosen technique do things it probably was not designed to do.
A Town Called Panic is one of the daftest films I have ever sat through with my son, who found it absolutely hilarious, and I mean that as a recommendation.
It is a Belgian stop-motion comedy built out of cheap plastic toy figurines, chiefly a Cowboy, an Indian and a long-suffering Horse who share a house, and it runs on a kind of frantic, deadpan absurdity I had not quite seen before.
A simple plan to build the Horse a birthday barbecue spirals, at breakneck speed, into total lunacy, and the film never once stops to apologise for any of it.
The humour is the whole point, and it is very much its own thing: fast, silly, gleefully surreal, the sort of film where ordering fifty million bricks passes for a perfectly reasonable plot development. It is very funny in places, and you do need to bring a sense of humour to it, because it has no interest in making conventional sense. My son and I both lost it at the moment where the horses, of all creatures, start making out, which is more or less exactly the register the whole thing runs in.
It will not be for everyone; if you need your comedy to behave itself, this will drive you spare. But taken in the right spirit it is a joy, inventive and anarchic, wholly committed to its own nonsense, and it is easy to see how it became a bit of a cult favourite.
Three and a half stars, a gloriously silly stop-motion romp that had the pair of us laughing, which is about the highest praise a family film can earn.
A Town Called Panic is the sort of film that resists being placed tidily alongside anything else, which is arguably its greatest strength and, depending on your patience for organised chaos, its greatest challenge. Belgian animation has a habit of producing work that travels awkwardly across cultural borders, not because it is inaccessible but because it refuses to sand down its stranger edges for a broader audience. This one keeps all its edges intact. It rewards the kind of viewer who is willing to surrender to its logic entirely and punishes anyone who expects it to meet them halfway. As cult objects go, it is a very honest one: exactly what it says it is, nothing more and nothing less, and completely at peace with that. Sometimes the silliest things are the ones that stick.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2009 | Watched: 2026-09-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for A Town Called Panic (2009) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: OVID
Physical: Amazon US
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