BEST OF 2010: NUMBER 6

A TOWN CALLED PANIC

For 2008 and 2009 my ultimate favorite movies were animated films. I seemed to reflect, in both the situations of Wall-E and Coraline, that these perfectly crafted new worlds truly transformed me, as a film-watcher, into a different environment that tapped into a child-like sense of wonder along with a true heart of a story. If you go to films to truly escape, what could be ideal than a fantasy land of beautiful images, especially if the images and story tap into more universal dramas and have lovable characters.

When I watched A Town Called Panic at the Wisconsin Film Festival, in between the nonstop giggling moments I couldn't help but think about how I judged the animated marvels of recent years, and that this completely unique animated world and unmitigated joy brightly expressed on the screen was giving me such a strong criterion to once again crown an animated movie as the top film I will ever see this year. As the year went by, and I thought more and more about the quality of films I had seen, a little bit of a more reasonable attitude prevailed. Quite simply, and I mean this in the absolute best way possible, A Town Called Panic is just too silly to be my favorite movie of 2010.

Now you can ignore that last sentence, because silliness can take you a long way on its own, and nothing I have seen in a long time created such a madcap pace of goofiness as this inventive Belgian animated movie. There's no way to intelluctualize this giddy movie into a long analysis about the nature of my personal cinematic journey. This movie represents what happens when inventive grown-ups take a trunk full of toys and let their imaginations loose. Nothing is expected or taken seriously in a Town Called Panic yet there is an innocent Loony Tunes like sense of structure and closure that makes this more that an exercise in random surrealism. Leaving logic at the door is freeing, and this movie provides that escapism in spades (and lots and lots of bricks).