A Town Called Panic

Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar's A Town Called Panic (Panique au village) opened Out of Competition at Cannes 2009, the first stop-motion animated feature ever programmed at the festival. It won Magritte Awards for Best Sound and Best Production Design, becoming a landmark for the small but distinctive Belgian animation tradition. The feature was developed from a long-running short series the directors had produced for Belgian and French television since 2000.

Three plastic toy figurines — the brusque Cowboy, the easygoing Indian, and their put-upon Horse — share a ramshackle house in a tiny mountain village where everyday life quickly spirals into chaos. When Cowboy and Indian accidentally order fifty million bricks instead of fifty for Horse's birthday present, their ensuing attempts to dispose of the surplus precipitate a sequence of escalating crises that send the trio underground, undersea, into the Arctic, and eventually into the orbit of Madame Longray, the elegantly French-speaking horse riding teacher with whom Horse falls hopelessly in love.

The animation — toy figurines moved one frame at a time on tabletop sets, every door slammed and every horse-canter performed by hand — produces a visual register utterly distinct from any computer-animated children's feature. The film's commercial reach was modest; its cultural-influence has been disproportionate among animators, and Aubier and Patar continue to make shorts in the same universe.