Vincent Patar

Growing up in Belgium, the animation duo of Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar loved to play with plastic toy figurines.

“I had a neighbor who I was kind of jealous of because he had more,” said Aubier on the phone from New York, speaking through a translator. ‘I used to play with his toys.’ And Patar? ‘I preferred to play with Smurfs,’ he said.

Their love of these little plastic toys has come in handy in their adult lives. The team, known as Pic Pic André after the central characters of their first successful hand-drawn cartoon, used these playthings as the lead characters of their popular cult animated TV series, ‘A Town Called Panic,’ which was released in several countries including the U.S. by Aardman Animations, of “Wallace & Gromit” renown.