A Town Called Panic

A Town Called Panic is a Belgian stop-motion animated feature following the crazy adventures of a cowboy, an indian, and a horse. It's chaotic and frenetic and colorful and relentlessly silly.

The plot is simple and absurd: Cowboy and Indian need a birthday present for Horse. They mistakenly buy him 50 million bricks and ultimately wind up losing their house. They all go on a big zany journey together to get their house back.

The movie is based on a TV series featuring little animated dolls mounted on stands stuck to their feet, not unlike the army men in the Toy Story movies. The world it takes place in is goofy and surreal. Horse is the brains of the trio. Cowboy and Indian constantly get into mischief, while Horse drives a car and signs up for piano lessons in order to get closer to a lady horse.

If you can't tell, the movie is a ton of fun. It has a very short running time of about 75 minutes, and it flies by. I was happy to see the version on Netflix Instant Watch was subtitled and not dubbed. You never know with animated stuff. I don't watch anime on Netflix because it's always dubbed.

I'm a week behind on these, so this one is going to be especially short. I'm beginning to realize how arbitrary I am with grading these movies. Most of them just fall into "like" and the occasional "didn't like", but I always try to apply a letter grade to it, and I rarely give much thought to what grade I give it. Continuing in that tradition, I'm giving A Town Called Panic a near-meaningless B+.