A Town Called Panic (Panique au village)

I went to see this brilliant and original film today at the Prince Charles Cinema off Leicester Square and I am still smiling now. I honestly cannot recommend it enough. Not even the forty-year-old man-child sitting next to me and his incessant braying could put me off.

Based on a popular Belgian television series called Panique au village, it is an old school stop-motion that eccentrically tells the story of three children’s toys: Horse (Cheval), Indian (Indien) and Cowboy (Cowboy). The story is difficult to summarise but I will have a go. In short, it is Horse’s birthday and Indian and Cowboy try and surprise him by making him a barbecue but accidentally order 50,000,000 bricks instead of 50 from the internet. The bricks, haphazardly piled on top of their house eventually destroy the building and every time they try and rebuild it, the walls are stolen by mysterious thieves. The action that then transpires takes them to the centre of the earth, the middle of the ocean, underwater and across frozen tundra in an anarchic and unhinged sequence of events.

Life-endangeringly funny for both adults and children alike, it has been dubbed “Toy Story on absinthe” and there is some truth in that but it does not do justice to how droll it really is. The directors, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, are quickly dispelling any lazy British stereotypes about the Belgians being boring with the sheer inventiveness and humour of their picture.

An official selection at Cannes, the movie really deserved more  British recognition and a longer run than it got first time around but, of course, the subtitle factor always plays a part in commercial success. At a shade over 70 minutes, it positively flies by. So much so I want to go and see it again and I would advise you to do the same.