10 Wonderfully Quirky And Eccentric Animated Movies

7. A Town Called Panic

Where Pixar's Toy Story trilogy rendered CG versions of popular children's toys to bring them to life, A Town Called Panic takes the toys themselves and animates them through stop motion, resulting in an inventively comical style with which to tell an equally creative, madcap story. That said, trying to explain the story to A Town Called Panic is a pointless endeavour - it's a film which deliberately eschews narrative logic and common sense in favour of a relentless stream of increasingly ridiculous events as Cowboy, Indian and Horse set off an a journey after accidentally destroying Horse's home. With the energy and vitality of children at play, it's a film where free association takes the viewer from one trippy scene to the next, jam packed with visual gags. It's not surprising that one reviewer described A Town Called Panic as "Toy Story on absinthe" - it's hard not to get the impression that the creators had ingested more than their fair share on hallucinatory plants, taking drug-induced ramblings as the foundation for the film. Strange and beguiling, it's the movie version of being inside the mind of a hyperactive kid after too many E-numbers, brilliantly chaotic and wildly unpredictable.