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...
© James Travers 2013
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