Zeitgest Films
A scene from the film “A Town Called Panic,”
which uses toys and stop-motion animation.

“A Town Called Panic” is an adventure story as fast-paced and exciting as any currently in theaters. The fact that it stars a dashing plastic horse and his excitable wards, a plastic cowboy and Indian, only makes it that much better.

Directed by the Belgian animators Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, “A Town Called Panic” (the original title is “Panique au Village”) is an extension of a cult-favorite television show, and before that a series of short films, which first took shape when the collaborators were in art school in the 1980s. For American audiences the use of toy figures and stop-motion animation might call to mind the Cartoon Network show “Robot Chicken.” But Mr. Aubier and Mr. Patar are up to much more than pop-culture parody, though they do their share of that.

Throughout, they’ve been constructing their own world, an absurdist, chaotic version of the pastoral European countryside — la France profonde meets Buster Keaton — with its own freewheeling logic. The film’s humor, simultaneously giddy and satirical, is reminiscent of “South Park” and the “Wallace & Gromit” movies, but it’s less pointed, more poetic. Michel Gondry’s dreamscapes come to mind, as well as the silent thrillers of Louis Feuillade.

After an opening scene in which we witness the morning rituals at the home of Horse, Cowboy and Indian — which include Horse taking a shower and using the toilet — the utterly silly but meticulously worked-out plot of “A Town Called Panic” gets under way. Having forgotten to buy Horse a birthday present, Cowboy and Indian decide to build him the barbecue pit he’s been wanting. They need bricks, so they order them from an online brick seller. A key gets stuck and instead of 50 bricks, they take delivery of 50 million.

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