If The Triplets of Belleville signals the sunset of animation without computers, the film's cleverness, warmth and honesty assure a grand finale.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published February 12, 2004
[Sony Pictures Classic]
The Triplets of Belleville uses few words, instead relying on the characters’ expressions to carry the story.
The central theme of The Triplets of Belleville is devotion, certainly the characters' devotion to their loved ones, ambitions and art, but especially that of writer-director Sylvain Chomet, a comic book artist making his feature film debut, and an astounding one at that.
The Triplets of Belleville is nominated for an Academy Award, pitted against the whale-size hit Finding Nemo, in the best animated film category. The films couldn't be more different, with Chomet and his artists using mostly their hands to draw these bizarre, beautiful images rather than fingers to click a computer mouse. Where Finding Nemo has an Oscar-nominated screenplay, Chomet's film contains perhaps 50 words, most of them French and none subtitled.
This is the work of a man who loves pure art, not the technology that can make it crisper and more digestible. Chomet also loves people: the warmth in some to cherish and the coldness in others to ridicule. Defining the mind-set of the creator is simpler than classifying exactly what he did with it.
Chomet begins with a wicked homage to the black and white celebritoons, in which movie stars and musicians were spoofed in ink, created in the 1940s by Max and Dave Fleischer. This one is set in a ritzy nightclub where the glamorous, anonymous triplets perform Belleville Rendezvous, a bouncy tune nominated for a best song Academy Award. Django Reinhardt plays guitar with his toes. Josephine Baker is topless while leering men pluck her banana costume. Fred Astaire shuffles to the beat until his shoes sprout teeth and devour him.
The show turns out to be a television broadcast with technical difficulties, watched by a pudgy boy - soon a long-nosed young man - named Champion and his tenderly devoted grandmother, Souza. He dreams of racing in the Tour de France, and she does all she can to help, tuning Champion's bicycle spokes like musical instruments, following on long rides, tweeting on a cadence whistle. Back home, their puppy, Bruno, has gorged himself to obesity and patiently waits for the next serving when he isn't barking at passing trains.
Champion qualifies for a race, falls back in the pack and is kidnapped by block-shouldered mobsters. Their boss, a stumpy grump with a wine-inflamed nose, plans to build a stationary bicycle race for illegal gambling. Souza and Bruno know only that Champion is missing, and they'll stop at nothing to get him back.
Just when things look bleakest in Belleville, Souza meets the triplets, who have lost their youth and instruments but not their ability to swing. They take Souza and Bruno into their home for moral support and meals that consist only of frogs caught with hand grenades. They eventually discover Champion's predicament and hatch a rescue plan, turning what began as a gentle fable into an action-movie parody. Like the final act of Spike Jonze's Adaptation, Chomet's climax embraces film cliches, yet deflates them just enough to let us know how much he despises them.
Amazingly, this complex tale is clearly conveyed with sparse dialogue. Chomet does it with only his character's expressions - in Souza's case, that's merely shifting her pupils - and a symphony of ambient sound, syncopated noise and a big band beat. What we hear is often as vital as what Chomet shows us, although Triplets of Belleville could subsist on his flair for sight gags alone.
Chomet's film brims with influences, uses computer animation sparingly and never overshadows the hand-drawn skill. The artwork is a weird brew of lines, shapes and motion that will remind viewers at times of Friz Freleng's Pink Panther cartoons, Mike Judge's Beavis and Butt-head, even Disney's Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians. Then there are the flesh-and-blood film inspirations: the comic sensibilities of Jacques Tati, a hint of Sergei Eisenstein coupled with a sly wink at The French Connection, a feeling that we've seen this kind of caper before but with humans and in a much less entertaining form.
The sources of Chomet's humor are classical: grotesque exaggeration, stereotypes and perfectly strung out running jokes. Belleville is a city of rotund consumers, waddling through neighborhoods culled from Paris, Quebec and New York, including a Statue of Liberty holding ice cream like a torch and clutching a cheeseburger to her breast. A snooty maitre d' literally bends over backward to please his patrons. The triplet's amphibian diet is insultingly French. Even the Disney empire gets nudged.
The best running gag is Bruno, whose thoughts are revealed to an amazing degree. We learn why he barks at trains, how they influence his monochromatic dreams, how he got so fat. We understand the source of his devotion to Champion (food, of course), and know how much those frogs must freak him out if he can't choose whether to bark at them or a rumbling train. Bruno is a wonderful creation, stealing scenes when it shouldn't be possible.
Nobody should miss Chomet's imaginative feat. With Disney closing animation studios and replacing artists with computers, and all other studios either falling in step or not caring, we may not see a physically intensive labor of love like this again. If Finding Nemo is the future of animated films, then The Triplets of Belleville is a last, fond look over our shoulders at the past.
The Triplets of Belleville
Grade: A
Director: Sylvain Chomet
Cast: Briefly heard voices of Michele Caucheteux, Jean-Claude Donda, Michel Robin, Monica Viegas
