A Town Called Panic (Panique Au Village) -- OUAN403, Animation Skills, Identify

A Town Called Panic is a stop frame adventure set in a bonkers French rural village, and follows the adventures of three housemates; Cowboy, Indian and Horse, along with a cast of other creatures. The production company also created a series of adverts for Cravendale milk which featured a pirate, football player and cow. The animation style is jerky, and deliberately crude - I say deliberately because at first it seems like the character models are simple static figures wobbling around, but throughout the course of the film you realise that the main characters each have hundreds of different models in varying positions. Almost in the way that South Park uses high end 3D software to replicate paper-cutout animations, this film has a rough-around the edges feel that reminded me of my youth spent playing with toys on the bedroom floor with my brother and making up wacky stories and adventures. The film embraces all the surreal possibilities that animation allows, the obvious example would be animals and humans co-existing, but we also see buildings transforming, falling apart and being rebuilt at impossible speed, and various other tricks that break or bend the laws of physics in ways only animation can achieve. In fact this film seems to be proof that the more jerky and unrefined the animation, the more unrealistic or impossible scenes you can get away with. Sort of like the uncanny valley effect seen in robots or waxworks (and in realistic CGI) where, as the imitation of a human becomes more and more lifelike and realistic, the small and sometimes unnoticeable differences become more apparent and give the viewer a sense of uneasiness. Pixar have combated this effect by designing their human characters in a highly stylised way, but in A Town Called Panic they go the other way - towards a more rudimentary look, and I feel like they are able to keep things totally believable even as the incredible or impossible is happening.