The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes De Belleville)
Every so often the far fringes of animation cough up something so unique that it's almost beyond criticism. The work of Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away") and Bill Plympton falls into this category; so does Richard Linklater's "Waking Life." The French animator Sylvain Chomet's "The Triplets of Belleville" is the latest emissary from the cartoon beyond, a simple yet darkly hilarious tale of a boy, his grandmother, her dog, and three frog-eating vaudeville stars.
If it's not for kids, it's also not not for kids -- although an early scene in which Fred Astaire gets eaten by his own shoes might freak out tiny sensibilities used to "Lilo and Stitch." All you really need to enjoy "Triplets" is a taste for the weird and the wonderful.
Told in near silence -- there's a smattering of French dialogue but the soundtrack is filled mostly with creaks, splats, barks, and the stray potato-masher detonation -- "Triplets" opens with a squat old lady desperately trying to amuse her grandson Champion, a rotund boy with Charles de Gaulle's nose and limpid eyes. He seems interested in bicycles so she buys him a trike; cut to years later, and he's a skeletal racer coached around the cobblestones of Paris by his taskmaster grandma and her world-weary lump of a dog, Bruno.
Champion enters the Tour de France -- bike geeks in the audience will get a satirical charge out of the gaunt racers with their massive calf muscles -- but halfway up the Col du Femur he is kidnapped by villains who look like the Men in Black cross-pollinated with a Kleenex box. Champion and two other luckless cyclists are spirited across the sea in an ocean liner, with Grandma in hot pursuit via paddleboat. Chomet draws the journey with disproportionate beauty: The world itself seems to spin under the old lady's determination.
They end up in Belleville -- part Manhattan, part Montreal, all bent angles and squalor -- where Champion is forced by a diminutive wine mogul to participate in underground races on a strange Rube Goldberg contraption. Grandma searches high and low and is eventually taken in by the triplets of the title, three wizened old music-hall sisters who, in the movie's height of icky whim, dine exclusively on concussed frog.
I'll let you take it from there -- and take it you should, because Chomet draws with an eccentric invention that has few antecedents. True, there's some of George Booth's "New Yorker" cartoons in that dog, and the filmmaker admits to his fondness for French slapstick genius Jacques Tati through posters on the triplets' wall and clips on their TV. (The opening scene, a droll faux-1930s cartoon with caricatured appearances by Astaire, Django Reinhardt, and the triplets in their prime, seems a doff of the cap to Max Fleischer of "Betty Boop" fame.)
But then there are bits that come straight from the animator's brainpan, like those dinnertime variations on frogs and tadpoles, or the galumphing, percussive musical numbers the sisters perform using such found objects as a wire refrigerator shelf and a vacuum cleaner (the results, composed by Benoit Charest, sound like dinner music for cavemen).
There's a seedy beauty to Chomet's vision -- the colors are muted, the lines rough and old-world -- and a love of indominability, whether it's grandma forever stomping after grandson, Bruno endlessly barking at elevated trains, Champion pedaling and pedaling, or the three sisters' uncorkable showbiz glee. "The Triplets of Belleville" is a shaggy paean to an ingrained human stubbornness that includes, among other things, drawing something over and over until it somersaults into life.
Video
