A Town Called Panic

Animals and people are all jumbled up in this hyperactive Belgian puppet animation. The filmmakers, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, show little regard for scale and less for convention. Cowboy (Aubier) is a screeching hysteric, and Horse (Patar) is a slow-moving romantic hero who longs to play the piano and carries a torch for the local music teacher, a mare with an orange mane and sultry voice (Jeanne Balibar). Cowboy, Indian (Bruce Ellison) and Horse share a house that sinks to the center of the Earth, when Indian mistakenly orders a million times as many bricks as necessary to build a barbecue for Horse’s birthday. Actually, that makes the narrative seem almost linear. A Town Called Panic embodies a sensibility that might be termed “extreme quirk.” The movie has a manic whimsy and, like child’s play, is noisy, over-excited and very pragmatic.