The Triplets of Belleville

2003 French animation

Rating: 18/20

Plot: On the outskirts of Paris, Madame Souza raises her grandson Champion in a house that is taller than it is wide. She searches desperately for a hobby (toy trains, a dog named Bruno) for her grandson and eventually learns of his interest in cycling. She buys him a tricycle and later helps him train for the Tour de France. When he's kidnapped by the French mafia during his race, however, Souza and Bruno have to run off to rescue him. They enlist the helps of the title characters, a now-elderly but once-famous Vaudevillian song-and-dance trio and take on the mafia.

How much do I love this movie? Finding Nemo is my favorite Pixar movie, and I'm not sure I agree that it should have won for best animated feature over Triplets. There are bucketfuls of grotesque brilliance here, a creative fervor that reminds you just how exciting animation can be. Quirky in that French way and with a seemingly misanthropic bent (there are a lot of grotesquely overweight or ugly characters and some blink-and-you-miss-'em details [i.e. Statue of Liberty's holding platters of hamburgers] that border on the satirical), but this still somehow manages to sneak in a little sweetness. I just love how this movie squelches along. With nearly no dialogue (there's actually just a tiny bit at the end; everything else is indiscernible mumblings or grunts or horse noises), it's all about the Hulot-esque sound effects and visuals, so much, in fact, that it's hard to imagine why this isn't really boring. But it's so refreshingly odd that there's no way "boring" can be part of a discussion of this. If I were to describe my favorite scenes to somebody who has never seen this, it'd likely leave them scratching their heads. "And then they bust into this weird little frog song for no reason." "And the dog has this little dream where he's on the train." "And you should see that chase scene--it all seems like it's in slow motion!" Sound like exciting stuff, right? How much do I love this movie? This is my third time seeing it, and I can't think of another example of a movie I rented and watched twice before returning it, but that's exactly what happened when I first saw it in '04.

But where's Chomet's follow-up to this? Five years is too long to wait! Chomet did have one of the more brilliant segments of Paris Je T'aime (not animated but it did have mimes), but other than that, nothin'. Come on, brotha!