Panic In The Streets! Panic In The Skies! It's A TOWN CALLED PANIC!
Ah, I've been waiting for footage from this for a good while now and my patience has finally been rewarded. Belgian animation A Town Called Panic - Panique Au Village in the original French - has existed in a few different formats before making the transition to the big screen and, cult hit or not, it's honestly hard to imagine a more unlikely big screen animated feature. Why? No, it's not sex or violence. Those have been done and done and done. It's that A Town Called Panic is the most deliberately - and hysterically - lo fi stop motion animated project you're ever likely to come across. Sets are constructed from cardboard and other household materials and the entire world populated with rigid hard plastic figures, the sort that you may have gotten in farm or cowboy sets to play with when young. The kind certain to choke any young child foolish enough to put them into their mouth. They wobble about their little world having odd little adventures, led on by the exploits of Cowboy, Indian and Horse. You can guess which play set they came from.
In one of their crazy adventures Cowboy, Indian and Horse discover a strange and fascinating underwater world. A conflict with the inhabitants of this underwater world is solved with the physical and geographical distribution of the two worlds….
We've got seven brief clips from this below the break and while I believe they're taken from the feature film I'm not one hundred percent prepared to swear to it. But wherever they're from, they're awesome.
