One of the rare feature-length animated films (and the only one in stop-motion) to appear in the Cannes Film Festival, A Town Called Panic is sure to live up to the cult status of the Belgian TV series upon which it delightfully expands. As in the series, here the town of Panic is populated by a random assortment of plastic figurines whose daily activities recall children’s illogical narratives in their herky-jerky disjointedness, celebration of the quotidian and profound brilliance. Cowboy and Indian decide to give their friend Horse a birthday present, but thanks to an Internet shopping typo end up with 50 million bricks for Horse’s new barbecue. The trio must then travel to the center of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe populated by pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures. In an age of high-tech animation and CGI effects, A Town Called Panic is refreshingly homegrown, the product of ingenious imagination and a surreal, often nostalgic, sense of childhood absurdity.

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Bay Area Premiere. Written by Stéphane Aubier. Vincent Patar, Guillaume Malandrin, Vincent Tavier. Photographed by Jan Vandenbussche. With Stéphane Aubier, Jeanne Balibar, Bruce Ellison, Vincent Patar, Benoît Poelvoorde (75 min, Zeitgeist)