Triplets Of Belleville (DVD)

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I have two words to say about "The Triplets of Belleville": Gahan Wilson.

Any baby boomer who´s ever bought (and hidden from parents) copies of Playboy will know exactly what I´m talking about. Wilson, whose cartoons were as much a staple of the magazine as those naughty centerfolds, had an offbeat, irreverent style of cartooning that bordered on the macabre. His characters, whether gangly or sawed-off, never had normal body types. They were always grotesques, with their bug-eyes and dominant features exaggerated to the point where they seemed not just cartoon characters, but caricatures of real people. In Wilson´s world, babies often looked like adults, and adults sometimes looked like babies. And everyone looked as distorted on the outside as they were implied to be on the inside.

French animator-director Sylvain Chomet must have gotten his hands on more than a few Playboys when he was a youngster, because that´s exactly how his "Triplets" and the characters that inhabit their world are drawn. The only real difference is that Wilson, who was the first wannabe-cartoonist admitted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, used considerably more crosshatching to give his figures a dense and dark woodcut appearance. One of them I still vividly remember: a squat old man sitting in a chair, shriveled up like an apple carving, was asked by an interviewer, "I take it, Senator, that you approve of the current seniority system?" Which is to say, it struck me that even Wilson´s comic sensibility has a lot in common with Chomet´s animated film.

"Triplets," which was nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar (but lost to "Finding Nemo"), is one odd duck of an animated film. No wonder it was an official selection at the 2003 Cannes, Telluride, and Toronto film festivals. For one thing, it´s a silent movie, insomuch as there´s no dialogue (only Foley effects and music), which places the focus squarely on the distinctively offbeat artwork. And Chomet´s attention to detail makes the backgrounds a visual treat. Then there´s the PG-13 rating, which Chomet said was bestowed upon them because of the opening sepia sequence that was drawn to resemble a silent-era cartoon. It features the Triplets performing at the height of their career in a vaudeville-style venue. One of the acts is a topless Josephine Baker, complete with banana skirt. What happens is that the henpecked husbands in the audience shrink to become monkeys that rush the stage and the cartoon Baker to cop a banana, not something else. In another "opening act"—and that´s just how the prequel functions, as a tonal glimpse of coming attractions—Fred Astaire is attacked by his dancing shoes. Bizarre? You ain't seen nothing yet.

After the sepia sequence, which we discover was being watched on television by the young charge of an ageless old woman who played a bicycle wheel as percussionist for the sisters, we´re introduced to Mme. Souza and her forlorn pudgy grandson. Souza is devoted to Champion, and spies on him to try to sense what she can do to help him. She gives him a puppy, which grows to become the fattest dog on the planet and is named Bruno by the boy. And when she discovers not a Playboy hidden under his bed but a homemade scrapbook about bicycle racers, she buys him a tricycle. Then, when he graduates to a two-wheeler, she rides behind him on the original trike, blowing a whistle in strict cadence as the stage-mother/trainer who pushes him so that he will become a page in his own scrap-book. It´s both touching and funny. Small details abound, and they´re what make "The Triplets of Belleville" a joy to watch. Example? To suggest the passage of time so that we can accept that the pudgy boy has become a gangly man with highly overdeveloped calves and thighs, Chomet shows us the exterior of the family's house as it undergoes seasonal changes. But the final shot depicts the two-story house bent to the side by an elevated commuter train rail, which has sprung up like an unwelcome flower. Every time the train rumbles past, fat Bruno lumbers over to the window and barks.

When the Tour de France begins and Grandmama, whistle in mouth, sits in a lawn chair atop a support vehicle which follows her son and the other bicyclists, the palette changes (as it does throughout the film to match the emotional state or personality of the setting) to bright and festive colors. That is, except for sinister men dressed in black suits with exaggerated square shoulders, who apparently are the wine mafia. These Men in Block kidnap three tired racers, among them Champion, and haul them off to the docks where they board an ocean liner bound for Belleville. With only one franc to her name, Mme. Souza pursues. She misses the boat, literally, but rents a paddleboat for 20 minutes (the expression on the rental operator´s face is priceless when he realizes she´s not coming back) in order to follow the ocean liner all the way to the big metropolis. There, she enlists the aid of her old cohorts, who also live next to an elevated train. Will the wine mafia win out, or will the sawed-off Mme. Souza, with her huge block shoe to compensate for one very short leg, and the three gangly, crooning old crones save the day?