How A Town Called Panic (2009) takes your toys to the next level

Keep it simple, stupid. A phrase taught to students in commercial animation so that they will not overwork themselves. Simple is not to be confused with simplistic, however. One Belgian-French film from 2009 sought to prove how much can be achieved with very little. This blog will explore how A Town Called Panic, directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, combines the formal techniques of limited and stop-motion animation with witty dialogue and uniquely ridiculous scenarios in order to maximize the comedic possibilities within the confines of animating plastic figure toys. The film’s plot centers around the escapades of Cowboy, Indian, and Horse. In an attempt to build a barbeque spit for Horse’s birthday, Cowboy and Indian accidentally order fifty million bricks resulting in a chain reaction of increasingly ludicrous events. Eventually the trio’s shenanigans leave the entire town in ruins, wherein they decide they must all band together to rebuild from the ground up.

**Fig. 1 - The rolling clay hills and stop-motion characters of *A Town Called Panic*.**

The most immediately apparent visual aspect of A Town Called Panic is the choice for every character to resemble plastic toys, complete with an elliptical base stand to which the feet are attached. Despite this stylistic restriction, the characters are still traditionally rigged stop motion puppets capable of a full range of motion. These tiny figurines live in a secluded vista of rolling hills made from modeling clay that oozes with an “elementary school art project” aesthetic (Fig. 1). The sky above is a painting of wispy clouds overlaid onto a green screen, and remains as a single static image throughout the film’s runtime. The sky only changes during shots at night or during the rainstorm scenes. The names of most characters in the film are rather literal too. For example Horse is a talking horse, Postman is the postman, and Policeman is the police officer of the town. In contrast, there are additional characters such as Steven and Gerard. There is never an explanation for these arbitrary deviations from the previously established naming scheme, which reinforces the absurd humour of the film. Yet the use of “limited animation” within the film is its greatest visual strength, as the movement of the characters sells the toy-town nature of A Town Called Panic.

Limited animation is a term conventionally used to describe the style of mid-20th century American animated TV shows. This mode of animation sacrifices producing the fluid, lifelike movement that defines prior cinematic animation in the U.S., and instead produces aberrant, arrhythmic, and kinetically anemic visual movement (see Sullivan 2021). While this definition by Patrick Sullivan is describing traditionally hand-drawn 2D animation, it can also be applied to the stop-motion techniques and tricks utilized by Aubier and Patar in A Town Called Panic. The animators intentionally restrict the character movement to cycles of one or two strong key poses to ensure the illusion is not broken. Characters walk by hobbling on their stands, rather than a traditional 12 or 24 frame walk cycle. During a dance sequence, a visible lump of clay can be seen under the character’s feet holding them up while they bob about. There is also no use of lip-synching in the film, thus every character has a single facial expression painted onto them. For example, the character Horse talks by bobbing up and down in a three-frame cycle while his model holds the same pose. The delivery of the dialogue is matched by the frequency of the characters hopping back and forth as they talk, helping to sell the emotion of the scene without the use of facial expressions and lip synching.

Clever visual gags are made throughout the film through the placement of everyday household objects as props for the toy characters to interact with. In one sequence, the farmer Steven’s wife makes him a breakfast of a piece of real toast that she spreads chocolate on with a butter knife that dwarfs her in scale. She then fills a human-scaled coffee mug using a kettle far too big for her to reasonably carry. Characters interacting with household objects is a repeated gag in A Town Called Panic, and the characters never acknowledge the stark contrast in size between them and said objects. During the breakfast scene, Steven’s wife treats these kitchen utensils as if they were completely normal, which exaggerates the absurdity of the scene. After she is done preparing the food, Steven enters, eats the toast while levitating upside down across the table, smashes through the coffee mug, and continues out the door to start the day’s work. This scene only lasts about 20 seconds, but serves as a humorous transition away from the main trio who had occupied most of the prior screen time. Another subtle visual gag involves careful observation during the very beginning and the very end of the film. When Cowboy and Indian are first introduced, the wall behind the beds they are asleep in has two boarded up holes in it. Later, the door to their bedroom is shown littered with cracks and hasty repairs. No mention of how the door or wall became damaged is made at the time, but Cowboy does tell Indian to “mind the door” on his way in. The two characters do know something about the damage that the audience does not, but no more detail is given until later. At the end of the film, Steven throws Cowboy and Indian back into their room after they are caught stealing his tractor. The two burst into the room, smashing the door in the process. They then hit the wall hard enough to put holes into it. Cowboy and Indian are now in the same positions they were in when the film first introduced the two characters. It can then be inferred that the reason the door appeared cracked in the beginning of the film was due to the same reasons as in the end of the film.

Ultimately, by leveraging the efficiency of limited animation and the tactile appearance of stop-motion puppetry (see Felperin 2009), A Town Called Panic proves that more can be achieved with less in the world of animation. Imposing the limited animation restriction to the visual style adds a level of creative complexity that benefits the film’s overall form. The animators capitalised upon the rigid appearance of the plastic toy characters in order to express emotions and dialogue within the confines of a lower overall image count per second of screen time (Fig. 2). A Town Called Panic also makes the most out of everyday items by integrating them into the world of its characters seamlessly, and while the film certainly keeps it simple, the techniques showcased in its form are anything but stupid.

**Article published: October 11th, 2024**

References

Felperin, Leslie. 2009. “A Town Called Panic.” Variety 415, no. 4: 22.

Sullivan, Patrick. 2021. “Hanna-Barbera’s Cacophony: Sound Effects and the Production of Movement.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 16, nos. 1–2: 21–35.

Biography

Bryce Sheehan is a graduating student at the University of Texas at Dallas, Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. His primary focus is on lightning 3D environments for film and game production, but he also illustrates digitally for freelance work. Earlier versions of this text were developed with the help of Dr. Christine Veras and peers from the Animation Studies course.