[Still with the Anilogue Programme.]

Panique au village is a stop motion animated movie by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, who not only directed, but also wrote all and spoke most of the movie.

Plot:
It’s Horse’s (Vincent Patar) birthday and Cowboy (Stéphane Aubier) and Indian (Bruce Ellison) completely forgot to buy him a present. So they quickly order 50 bricks over the internet to build him a barbecue grill in the garden. Unfortunately, due to a slight typing accident, they order 50 million bricks instead. Ultimately, this leads to the destruction of their house and a trip basically around the world for the  three of them.

Panique au village would have worked perfectly as a short film (and apparently, it’s based on one), but at 75 minutes, it was definitely too long. The voice acting was incredibly unnerving and it didn’t help that I actually had to listen because the subtitling was being done live and that didn’t quite work out* (well, at least I understand French). Altogether, it was more annoying than entertaining.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you would play with figures or barbies or whatever kind of dolls/stuffed animals lying around the house. The way you’d start with a bit of a story in mind and things seemed to have a plot, for a while but then suddenly you were at the other end of the fictional world with no idea how or why you got there and what happened to the rest of the story you wanted to play out and where the hell have the aliens just come from?

Yeah, Panique is exactly like that. Including the voices you’d do: Either high and squeaky and unbearable to listen to or really low. Mostly it was just your normal voice, though.

But did you ever watch anybody play with their dolls when you were not involved? People, it’s mind-numbingly boring to watch. And really exhausting. Unfortunately, Panique was like that as well.

As a short film, it would have been really funny. As a feature, it lacks focus and good voice actors. There’s a wealth of imagination to it that’s frankly astounding and the animation is very good. But in the end, sitting through all of it, you’re fighting a losing battle with a headache and keep on wondering why you’re actually bothering after the first 15 minutes.

So, if you’re interested, you might want to check out the short film first and see if you can stomach it better than me.

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*Did I mention that during the Anilogue I saw two films that were shown with a Windows Media Player in the cinema? Fascinating.