Back in September, Kevin Drum
described how Netflix streaming works for him:
Basically, I think of something I want to watch and then go look for it. Usually it turned out that my choice wasn't available on streaming, which made the service pretty worthless to me. Apparently, though, most people don't work that way. They just dive into the streaming library and browse around until they find something that looks good. If that's the way you work, then the streaming service is a pretty good deal.
And that's basically the way it works for me; I go looking for something that might work for Family Movie Night, and every once in a while the Netflix algorithms recommend something that hits that sweet spot, and works equally well for the kids and the grownups.
Well, this Saturday, we hit the jackpot. On a chance, we tried a Belgian claymation toon entitled
A Town Called Panic. And all of us laughed our butts off.
Apparently the feature grew out of
a five-minute TV series, which was so damn wacky and imaginative that people couldn't get enough of it. The feature film is in French, with subtitles, and the animators' voices add to the general air of lunacy. I can't recommend this highly enough, though I don't want to give away too much, either. Just go stream it, then check out
their official website.
The soundtrack is a thing of wonder, too, and turned me on to
this garage-punk wacko, among others.
