"Triplets of Belleville" is a charming, fairytale-like story with some highly creative, very out-there and outrrrageously French stylings.
Madame Souza is raising her grandson (known only as 'Champion'), whose parents, we are led to assume, have died long before the film opens. The boy is quiet, withdrawn and seems uninterested in everything. After several failed attempts to get him out of his shell, Granny Souza buys him a puppy which he loves... and then falls back into melancholy apathy. Finally she discovers the boy's real passion when she buys him a bike.
Cut to 20 years later and the boy is now a dedicated young cyclist and Granny Souza is his coach, time-keeper and number 1 fan. Champion enters the Tour de France (with Granny right behind him in the follow wagon, blowing her training whistle every inch of the way). Falling behind the pack, however, he and two other cyclists are kidnapped by . They are taken to Belleville, a kind of America-on-steroids in the heart of France (go with it), where they are trained to take part in an underground and potentially deadly cycling event. Undeterred, Granny Souza tracks her grandson down and with the help of the now-aged triplets and her dog Bruno, plans a daring rescue.
But to begin at the beginning... We open with a self-consciously old-school black and white cartoon, the kind where everyone and everything is moving back and forth to the beat (think Betty Boop or Steamboat Willy). The style is spot-on but the content of the cartoon, which introduces us to the titular triplets performing their signature hit "Belleville Rendezvous," is kind of a turn-off. Big fat ladies pour out of tiny cars for the red-carpet performance dragging their (literally) spineless, foppish husbands flopping along with them - one of whom is stuck in his wife's hindquarters. The performance itself is wacky and kind of awesome (Jango Reinhardt plays guitar with his toes), if a little disturbing (Fred Astaire gets eaten by his tap shoes....).
And then Josephine Baker comes on stage, bare-breasted and with a skirt made of bananas. And then the top-hatted men in the audience turn into monkeys and race on stage to eat Josephine's banana-skirt. And then we pull back from the black and white cartoon into a TV set in the 'real' world of the animated feature. Which is a very good thing, because that's a really ugly moment and the rest of the film is rather wonderful.
Told in an almost-wordless style, animator Sylvain Chomet's first feature is a love-letter to old cartoons, Vaudeville, the films of Chaplin and Keaton and much, much more. The film is animated in a lovingly hand-drawn style, with skilful use of CGI for some of its tracking shots. Chomet loves the grotesque and the exaggerated - the mafiosi so tough and hunched over their entire bodies are literal rectangles, the cyclists with legs thicker than their torsos who act more like horses than men, the cruise liners so tall they would capsize with the first wave in the real world. At the same time, Chomet's team paint beautiful and nostalgic backdrops for their story, and Chomet obviously has real affection for Granny, Bruno and the triplets.
"Triplets of Belleville" is filled with great, imaginative touches that always make me smile. Bruno loves to bark at the train that passes right outside Granny Souza's window and we follow the dog into his dreams more than once as he pictures himself on that train being barked at by the passengers in his house window. The triplets' final performance, as pictured above, is an inventive hoot, set up as a gag on the sisters' inexplicable eccentricity earlier in the film. And the final chase scene is both epic and epically ridiculous (not to mention surprisingly explosive).
This is an incredible first feature - packed with energy and invention, it takes inspiration from (and directly references) so many different sources, while still being its own unique beastie. In many ways, though, it was just a warm-up for Chomet's 2010 masterpiece, "L'Illusioniste." But that, dear reader, is a tale for another post.
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