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 Meanwhile, the Metro has been
replaced by an elevated highway that shoulders the house to one side, so that it leans crookedly and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!
