Animation can be so predictable at times. Beautifully drawn characters dancing across the screen and singing about their true loves is pretty much a given. Not so in Sylvain Chomet's Les Triplets de Belleville. In fact, some of the characters are downright ugly - and I mean the protagonists. Ingeniously caricatured, the people in this amazingly artistic anime walk around totally representational of the emotional feelings they generate. This French film needs few words to accurately tell the complex story of a lonely boy, his dog, and his grandmother.
The boy, Champion, trains his whole life to be a professional bicyclist and compete in the Tour de France. When the mafia kidnaps him and takes him to Belleville, his devoted grandmother and his dog set off to find him. On the way, they enlist the help of the aging, once-famous Triplets of Belleville.
Wildly colorful and stylistic in his interpretation, Chomet uses a blend of standard animation, computer generation and real life film to tell this fascinating tale. For example, the dog, Bruno, dreams in black and white and in real life imagery, and he is endearingly complex in his behavior and his understanding throughout the film. Every character is symbolically emphasized visually in some way; the fat people are extremely fat, the fit people are extremely fit. No one type of person looks more appealing than any other type present in the film, thus everyone has a sense of individuality and equality. There seems to be so much more depth and detail present throughout the entire film than in other animated films. Honestly, this little one hour and fifteen minute masterpiece had me laughing, smiling, and thinking the entire time. Which is more than I can say for most movies.
Official Selection of the Cannes, Telluride, and Toronto film festivals, The Triplets of Belleville is highly imaginative and thoroughly heartwarming - if you don't mind seeing a frog or two being eaten. The film is full of fun period music, witty social commentary, and a most appreciated ingenuity.
Animation can be so predictable at times. Beautifully drawn characters dancing across the screen and singing about their true loves is pretty much a given. Not so in Sylvain Chomet's Les Triplets de Belleville. In fact, some of the characters are downright ugly - and I mean the protagonists. Ingeniously caricatured, the people in this amazingly artistic anime walk around totally representational of the emotional feelings they generate. This French film needs few words to accurately tell the complex story of a lonely boy, his dog, and his grandmother.
