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 the festival had ever programmed. It won Magritte Awards for Best Sound and Best Production Design, and it is a high point of the small but distinctive Belgian animation tradition. The feature grew out of a long-running series of shorts the directors had made 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 efforts to get rid of the surplus set off a run of escalating crises that send the trio underground, undersea and into the Arctic, all while Horse is hopelessly in love with Madame Longray, the elegant, French-speaking teacher at the riding school.

The figurines are moved one frame at a time on tabletop sets, and every slammed door and every canter of the horse is done by hand, so the film looks like no computer-animated children's feature. Its commercial reach was modest, but its influence among animators has been out of all proportion, and Aubier and Patar still make shorts in the same universe.