A Town Called Panic! - Literal Illustration Research
An animated (french) film which came out in 2009 is a great example to show how literal you can make animations. The characters on Town called Panic are very straightforward and humorous, e.g the horse is called Horse, the cowboy is called Cowboy and the Indian is called Indian.
The Plot - Animated plastic toys like Cowboy, Indian and Horse have problems, too. Cowboy and Indian's plan to surprise Horse with a homemade birthday gift backfires when they destroy his house instead. Surreal adventures take over as the trio travel to the center of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe where pointy-headed (and dishonest!) creatures live. With panic a permanent feature of life in this papier mâché town, will Horse and his girlfriend ever be alone?
I have watched this film and can say it’s extremely funny and well thought through, the story starts off in a very simple manner of the horse having a birthday and by each chapter everything gets more manic.
Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, the directors of ‘A Town Called Panic!’ also creates the very funny advertisements for ‘Cravendale’ milk.
Lastly, I love how the animation has been done with obvious looking toy models, it’s an interesting approach to see that the creators purposely went out their way to make the models not look realistic, however, make the model itself move, talk and express itself as if it were human. In A Town Called Panic, the Horse seems to have a wallet and house like a regular human being would.