Triplets of Belleville Online Discussion

On this post you will find three reviews of The Triplets of Belleville and one news story about the director. Give them a read and then dig into an online class discussion. Use ideas, concerns, analysis, and criticism from the articles as jumping off points. Use quotations. This post will be left open all weekend, so you can contribute up through Tuesday class time.

The Triplets of Belleville

BY ROGER EBERT / Dec 26, 2003

Ebert Rating: ***½

"The Triplets of Belleville" will have you walking out of the theater with a goofy damn grin on your face, wondering what just happened to you.

To call it weird would be a cowardly evasion. It is creepy, eccentric, eerie, flaky, freaky, funky, grotesque, inscrutable, kinky, kooky, magical, oddball, spooky, uncanny, uncouth and unearthly. Especially uncouth. What I did was, I typed the word "weird" and when that wholly failed to evoke the feelings the film stirred in me, I turned to the thesaurus and it suggested the above substitutes -- and none of them do the trick, either.

There is not even a way I can tell you what the film is "like," because I can't think of another film "like" it. Maybe the British cartoonists Ronald Searle and Gerald Scarfe suggest the visual style. Sylvain Chomet, the writer and director, has created an animated feature of appalling originality and scary charm. It's one of those movies where you keep banging your fist against your head to stop yourself from using the word meets, as in Monsieur Hulot meets Tim Burton, or the Marquis de Sade meets Lance Armstrong.

Most animated features have an almost grotesque desire to be loved. This one doesn't seem to care. It creates a world of selfishness, cruelty, corruption and futility -- but it's not serious about this world and it doesn't want to attack it or  improve upon it. It simply wants to sweep us up in its dark comic vision. The movie opens in France, where a small boy and his dog live in the top floor of a narrow, crooked house. The Metro roars past on schedule, and his dog races upstairs on schedule to bark at it, and the boy's grandmother gives the boy a trike and eventually a bike, and soon he is the foremost bicycle racer in the world. Meanwhile, the Metro has been replaced by an elevated highway that shoulders the house to one side, so that it leans crookedly and the stairs are dangerous for the dog to climb.

The grandmother is a ferocious trainer. A little whistle seems welded to her jaw, and she toots relentlessly as the boy pedals. Then he is kidnapped by thugs who want to use him for a private gambling operation, and the key to his rescue may be the Triplets of Belleville, who were music hall stars in the era of Josephine Baker, so how old would that make them now?

The action leaves Paris for New York, maybe, although it is more likely Montreal, where Chomet lives. Doesn't matter so much, since there has never been a city like this. Jazz joints from the 1930s exist with noir hideouts and bizarre tortures. After a certain point it isn't the surprises that surprise us -- it's the surprises about the surprises. We take it in stride, for example, when the Triplets go fishing for frogs with dynamite. Wasn't it only earlier this week, in "Big Fish," that Ewan McGregor hunted a giant catfish with dynamite? No, what amazes us is that one of the exploded frogs survives and crawls desperately from a scalding pot in its bid for freedom.

I am completely failing to do justice to this film. Now you think it is about frog torture. I will get letters from PETA. What happens to the frogs is nothing compared to what happens to the grandson, who is subjected to Rube Goldberg exercise machines, and at one point, has his kneecaps vacuumed.

Nostalgia For a Land That Twirls In Dreams

By A. O. SCOTT

There are some works of animation that are notable for their realism, for conjuring imaginary worlds whose inhabitants -- the sea creatures in ''Finding Nemo,'' the witches and princesses in classic Disney fairy tales, the wide-eyed heroines of Japanese anime -- move in more or less plausible ways through fantastical settings. Others -- the cartoons of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones come to mind -- rewrite the laws of physics and the conventions of physiology to suit their own fanciful requirements.

''The Triplets of Belleville,'' the first feature film by Sylvan Chomet, surely belongs in the second category. Mr. Chomet's is a universe of sheer impossibility, where size, proportion and balance are ruled by the whims of his perverse pen and peculiar imagination.

Although that imagination has evidently been fed by sources as various as Betty Boop, Jacques Tati and European comic books, its products are too strange to be assimilated into any known tradition. ''The Triplets,'' which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, may be the oddest movie of the year, by turns sweet and sinister, insouciant and grotesque, invitingly funny and forbiddingly dark. It may also be one of the best, a tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity.

The film's two lines of intelligible dialogue have been dubbed into English since it was shown, to rapturous applause, at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Its sensibility, however, remains irreducibly French, and it may confuse audiences used to the cuddly multicultural moralism that defines American feature-length animation.

The overture is a black-and-white spectacle: naughty, exuberant and a little creepy. It evokes Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire (eaten by his own shoes) and introduces the Triplets of the title, a trio of gangly, cloche-wearing scat singers. (They sing the movie's theme song, a swinging piece of nonsense likely to stick in your head for hours after you leave the theater.)

These celebrities turn out to be images flickering on a battered television set that belongs to Madame Souza, an old woman with thick glasses and orthopedic shoes who lives in a rickety building with her orphaned grandson, Champion. He is a gloomy, tubby boy who smiles only when his grandmother presents him with a tricycle, a gift that foreshadows his eventual transformation into a gaunt, sad-eyed Tour de France bicyclist with hypertrophied calves and thighs.

The story is too bizarre and wonderful to summarize, but it leads Madame Souza to Belleville, a Manhattan-like dream city populated by obese hamburger eaters, cretinous Boy Scouts, and a diminutive red-nosed French mafia chieftain. Belleville (not to be confused with the Paris neighborhood of the same name) is also the home of the Triplets, now ancient, who subsist entirely on frogs and frog byproducts and who make infectious music out of household appliances and carefully preserved newspapers.

''The Triplets'' is a similar collage of the found and the invented. Its style evokes a postwar France making its stubborn, eccentric way into the modern world, a nation of chain-smoking truck drivers and accordion-squeezing pop singers, presided over by Charles de Gaulle, whose beaked, chinless profile is mirrored in many of the film's faces, including Champion's. Mr. Chomet, who dedicated the film to his parents, clearly feels some nostalgia for the mixture of worldliness and parochialism that defined the bygone France. And it is possible to detect, in his view of the fleshy Bellevilleans, a whiff of Gallic disdain for the gigantism of American culture.

The twisting of cultural stereotypes has long been part of the cartoon heritage; think of the amorous Pepe le Peu, for example. In any case the tether that connects Mr. Chomet's imagined world with the real one is long and loose. He is a master of surprise, terror, silliness and sheer eccentricity, and this compact movie is stuffed nearly to bursting with astounding sequences: Madame Souza setting out in the moonlight, by pedal boat, in the wake of a giant ocean liner; her dog, Bruno, dreaming in black and white; one of the triplets hunting frogs with an hand grenade.

I could go on, and it is likely that before too long, bits and pieces of ''The Triplets'' will find their way into the cartoon lexicon. Best to see this curious and captivating film now, before some of its vivid strangeness fades into familiarity.

The Art of Noise

Kinetic French retro-toon and onomatopoeic Hungarian whatsit beat the curse of subtitles

J. Hoberman

published: Nov ember 25, 2003

Is there a way for foreign movies to avoid the curse of subtitles? Not with mime but with noise. The spirits of Mickey Mouse and Jacques Tati hover over the French-Belgian-Canadian animation The Triplets of Belleville and the Hungarian whatsit Hukkle; each is a splendidly eccentric first feature that triumphantly tosses aside dialogue in favor of a richly expressive audio mix. Finding Nemo and Looney Tunes: Back in Action notwithstanding, the year's most ingenious and original animated feature is the gloriously retro The Triplets of Belleville, written and directed by erstwhile comic-book artist Sylvain Chomet. The last Hollywood animation this good was The Iron Giant, and Triplets is similarly steeped in two-dimensional cartoon-ness.

The movie opens with a brilliantly executed pastiche of an early-'30s Fleischer Brothers Talkertoon—complete with scratches. A stretch-and-squeeze horde of funny-looking swells descends on an all-star variety show. Caricatured celebs performing for the rhythmically recycled audience include Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker, and Fred Astaire (devoured by one of his tap shoes). The stars of the show, however, are the eponymous triplets whose infectious scatting provides an insinuatingly manic and vaguely scatological backdrop.

Chomet leaves the spectator wanting more. The cartoon disintegrates into static, as watched on television by old Madame Souza and her morose, sharp-nosed grandson Champion, sometime during the de Gaulle era. (Chomet himself was born in 1963.) Madame Souza, Champion, and their obnoxiously barking dog, Bruno, live in an isolated house that's been knocked askew by a railroad trestle. For their world, Triplets switches to a proudly sketchy storybook style.

The spidery lines and spindly figures suggest Ronald Searle. The characters might be stuffed with kapok. The palette is subdued and autumnal—goldenrod and ochre with a burnt sienna wash. Virtually devoid of dialogue, Triplets is a narrative contraption that concerns a narrative contraption— as well as an animated cartoon that never stops thinking about motion. Madame Souza's every step is emphasized by a clunky orthopedic shoe. Champion becomes a fanatical bicyclist. Subjected by his grandmother to a hilariously intense regimen, he never stops riding his bike—even once he's kidnapped by two mysterious men in black and taken away in an oversize freighter. The boat sits on the Hokusai Sea like a rusty flame as the unstoppable Madame Souza and Bruno paddle after it, dodging storms and whales, to arrive in the alt-New York (cum Quebec) of Belleville.

The bovine Statue of Liberty in the harbor presages an entire city of big-bottomed fatties. (Chomet's characters are typically based on a few visual ideas. The bad guys are menacingly modular rectangular blocks, a maître d' is  designed to bend over backward, and a timorous mechanic wears fake mouse ears.) Living below the alt-Brooklyn Bridge, Madame Souza is discovered by the triplets, ancient but still scatting. The crones bring her back to their sordid tenement—kids will love the details—for a meal of mucky amphibian stew. Champion, meanwhile, is being held captive in a subterranean nightclub where gangsters gamble on virtual bicycle races—as in an old movie, the background scenery is furnished by primitive rear-screen projection. Triplets ends with a chase within a chase—the liberated captives still peddling away—and a requisite serving of smash and crash.

All animation is obsessive; Triplets also manages to seem fresh. It's nasty but droll, cheerfully grotesque, full of non sequiturs as well as deadpan repetitions, never cute and the opposite of precious. In the grand finale, the old ladies infiltrate the joint as a noise orchestra, performing their hits on newspaper, refrigerator shelves, and vacuum cleaner. You have to see it.

Artisanal French Animator Says No to His Mouse and the Mouse

David Ng

Nov. 25, 2003

Last summer, Jeffrey Katzenberg declared that "traditional animation is likely a thing of the past." This week, the new French film The Triplets of Bellevilleprovides ample evidence to the contrary. A hand-drawn smorgasbord of caricaturized modernity told with minimal dialogue, Triplets rejuvenates the 2-D genre through an artisanal obsession with detail. "I was trying a lot to carry on the animation of the '50s and '60s," says writer-director Sylvain Chomet, citing Disney's cel-based classics as a primary influence. "I wanted to take the technique of 101 Dalmatians and tell a story that's maybe a little more adult."

A veteran comic-book artist, the 40-year-old Chomet doesn't hesitate when asked about his foremost passion: "I like to draw, and I don't want to spend my time in front of a monitor with a mouse." Tripletsdoes contain some digital effects, but the characters—spindly cyclist Champion, his elfin grandmother, and their neurotic mutt—were created entirely by an intimate team of sketchers. "I was directing them at the same time I was animating," explains Chomet. "I could show what I wanted by drawing in front of them." While Triplets contains copious references to Tati and Chaplin, Chomet insists his inspirations were more contemporary. For the eponymous trio of music-hall dames who rescue Champion from the Mafia, he wanted to combine "the idea of these old women carrying basketball players inside of them" with the bebop charisma of 'Round Midnight'sDexter Gordon.

As personal as anything from the Disney/Pixar axis is mass-produced, Tripletsonly grows in scope and imagination, especially in the unveiling of Belleville, an ur-metropolis that Chomet describes as "a cross between New York and Montreal, or Chicago and Montreal." Ironically, Chomet once worked at Disney ("I've never been paid so much to be so useless"), and the experience has clearly honed his subversive tastes. Triplets contains both nudity and gun violence—taboo subjects for the Mouse's target demographic. "In the States today, there's more creativity in TV animation than in the cinema," Chomet ventures, listing South Park and Ren & Stimpy among his favorites. "What surprises me is that while you won't show guns in an animated film, your kids are allowed to have them."

 Okay, ready, gang? Dig in!