LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE review

Almost a year ago, they held the first screening of “Les Triplettes de Belleville,” in France for a very tiny industry audience made up of French Animators and folks from companies like Pixar, Dreamworks and whatnot. Was it a screening, or an unleashing? I’m not sure. For some reason, this film wasn’t in competition at Cannes, an astonishing shame in my opinion.

When I saw the film, some weeks ago, I was blown completely away. I’ve been in love with the trailers, the music and the concept of an animated film told almost entirely through motion and action and dynamics instead of relying upon dialogue. I’ve also hungered for a feature 2D animated film that didn’t look like it was related in the least to Disney or to Anime.

You see, I grew up with the work of Ralph Bakshi, Max Fleischer, U.B. Iwerks, the Warner Animators… hell, even Winsor McKay and his group. Among my earliest animated feature film memories is going to a theater with my parents to see FANTASTIC PLANET that wondrous French/Czech animated science fiction oddity about big blue giant people and their little H.O. Scale human pets. Then there was YELLOW SUBMARINE, which of course had that wild Peter Max style to it all. Growing up, my parents made sure I saw the feature film compilations of animated short films… So I saw classics like HUNGER and the earliest of Computer animation and the classics of Will Vinton like CLOSED MONDAYS and MOUNTAIN MUSIC. All that wonderful Canadian financed Animation. Then HEAVY METAL and ALLEGRO NON TROPO and WATERSHIP DOWN and THE WALL. Then it all just sort of seemed to die.

It was either Disney, Don Bluth or their off-shoots… and of course ANIME. I love those, but I hunger for the wildly stylistic differences. That’s what I love about the SOUTH PARK film and BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD DO AMERICA… Stylistically, they offered something new, as well as being funny as hell. It’s the reason I absolutely love Bill Plympton’s feature animations… and Linklater’s WAKING LIFE. As the death/coma of America’s 2D animation Majors occurs… and the shift goes to CG while that’s on life support… I really am hoping that those out of work 2D animators find homes & financing to reinvent 2D American animation. It is one of the dreams that comes from something like Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s THE ANIMATION SHOW… or SPIKE & MIKE’s FESTIVAL OF ANIMATION. There’s a void needing to be filled.

Watching this crazed brilliant and stunningly original across the board animated film from France and brilliant noggin of Sylvain Chomet… I can’t help but hope with every ounce of me that it finds the proper level of success to guarantee continued and long lasting work and success for Sylvain and his animators.

The style of THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE is a melding of French comics and Fleischer’s anything goes fluidity of movement. The film is kinetic, frenetic and rib-crackingly funny. In many ways, we have a story very much like that of FINDING NEMO.

There is a lost child and a guardian seeking to retrieve him. HOWEVER, these characters are so obscure and precisely drawn, that they feel less like any animated characters that you’ve ever seen, and instead I found myself thinking of this as some 2D crazed version of a Coen Brother or Tarantino or Jeunet & Caro flick.

We have a child, who I believe’s parents have died. He’s been put into the care of his club-footed grandmother that worries about his despondence and tries to find something that gives the boy a reason to go on. So she gets him a dog. That doesn’t do anything for him. She discovers that the boy has a bicycle fetish due to the one photo he has of his parents and him and the bicycle. He’s obsessed with cutting out information about the various Bicycle races in France, and she begins training him.

The dog is neglected, yet brought into the family unit through the training of the child/man… The over developed leg muscles of the grown boy, the impossible inhumanly thin caricature of a professional cyclist is hilarious… the twitching, the tautness of the calves, the kneading via an egg beater, the eating on a scale device… which is attached to some crazed Rube Goldberg device… which this film is filled to the brim with.

I don’t want to go to much into this film, but there’s an abduction, a trans-Atlantic pursuit, mobsters, ancient old women, potato smasher hand grenades… fucked up stuff with FROGS and so much more.

It is a musical delight, a visual masterpiece and one of the sheerest works of pure imagination I’ve seen animated in years. While I love FINDING NEMO, there’s a part of me that would dearly wish for this to win BEST ANIMATED FEATURE, if anything to contribute to the film possibly reaching a larger audience, which I know is a fool’s hope. Sadly the film will never have the money invested into a large enough marketing plan to get this anywhere near a mainstream… and unfortunately, the mainstream is not daring enough to really find a film as “Foreign” as this.

However, I will say this. I took my 3 year old nephew to see it and he loved it. The film is rated PG 13, but frankly – other than the crazed cartoony Josephine Baker banana skirt and the monkeys sequence, there isn’t really anything that a kid wouldn’t get out of classic 30’s era animation. And the only offense in that sequence would be the nude animated breasts, but let’s face it… just about every kid on the planet had a tit shoved in it’s mouth in the first few months to beef up his or her immune system and I can’t really imagine the damage done by this incredibly brief dance number… that is HILARIOUS.

Anyway, if you hunger for something astonishingly different from everything you’ve ever seen. If you want a film that has a groove for you to follow and laughs that never cease and visuals that make you just go gaga, then check this out.

If you have to be spoon-fed safe corporate animation, then by all means continue on your sad pathetic non-adventurous animated existence.