DVD reviews
Immortals
"... a thundering example of style over substance."
Midnight In Paris
“...a delightful tribute to nostalgia and romance.”
The Illusionist
“...a film that generally brings warm smiles rather than belly laughs...”
Treasure Guards
"A willing suspension of disbelief should get most viewers across the line."
search the site
newsletter
Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter
A Town Called Panic (DVD)
Year: 2009
Rating: PG
Director: Stephane Aubier, Vincent Patar
Cast: Jeanne Balibar, Nicolas Buysse, Veronique Dumont
Release Date: March 02, 2011
Distributor: Madman
The Film: 3.0
The Disc: 3.0
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5“...outrageously avant-garde and charmingly homespun...”
Both outrageously avant-garde and charmingly homespun, A Town Called Panic is a feature length, amateur-chic claymation out of francophone Europe. It is the evolution of an Aardman Animations distributed television series of the same name, and like that studio's Wallace & Gromit film and Chicken Run, its episodic nature can make for difficult going at times.
Absurdism is the name of the game here, with a trio of crappy plastic toys - Horse, Cowboy and Indian - squeaking at one another in hyper-speed French and then dashing off to attend to some loosely related adventure. Its weakness is also its strength, however: as there is no linear plotline to follow, it becomes easier to let oneself go in the film's strong current of sight gags, inscrutable non sequitors and childlike silliness as the trio find themselves in far and distant lands, making friends and enemies and trouble over 75 very short minutes.
Special features include a 52 minute making-of, interviews with the directors, deleted scenes, test shot comparisons and short film Obsessive Compulsive, which was chosen by the A Town Called Panic directors as the winner of a stop-motion animation contest.
