Triplets Of Belleville (DVD)

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The plot is wild, the backgrounds and style of cartooning is wild, and the concept is wild. And if you have the patience to watch a silent animated feature for 81 minutes you´ll find it rewarding. There are some memorable scenes, as when one swaybacked sister shuffles off to the marsh with a net and an old WWII "potato masher" grenade, which she calmly tosses into the water and waits to catch some of the frogs that rain down after the explosion. The group eats them whole, as they float in broth! I should warn, though, that the concept of watching an animated feature for so long without dialogue is so foreign that it may get old just past the movie´s midpoint. Some may think the concept better suited to a short film—which is to say that "The Triplets of Belleville" may be an acquired taste. Any drama or action is really low-key.

Video:
The transfer to disc is excellent. "The Triplets of Belleville" is mastered in high definition and presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1). The backgrounds are glorious to behold, whether they´re dingy skid-row settings at night, bright and sunny race days, amber-lit apartments crammed with knick-knacks, or skyscrapers rising to define that grand city of Belleville.

Audio:
It´s almost amusing to see Dolby Digital 5.1 language options in English and Spanish, and not just because this is a French film that was released on VHS in French. There are only a handful of moments in the film where any words are sung, and most of the lyrics are performed in French, just as an announcer on television speaks in French with no subtitles. But those are your language options, and you won´t notice whether you´ve hit the wrong button or not. The sound quality is bright and crisp, which is paramount for a film so dependent upon Foley noises for it´s audio life. You can hear the spoon scraping across teeth as Champion eats his gruel.

Extras:
There aren´t a ton of extras, but with a French animation team it´s fortunate that there are any at all. The "Making of ´The Triplets of Belleville´" feature is only 16 minutes long, and it´s assembled from interview clips of Chomet and his art director talking about the film in English, and the music director speaking in French with subtitles. It´s interesting to hear a French animator´s take on CGI, though, and even more fascinating to watch him draw the old fashioned way in order to get a handle on 3-D possibilities by sketching page after page and then flipping them to see how it might animate. Belleville, we learn, was a composite city based on Montreal, Paris, and New York City which was deliberately drawn to reflect the capital of "fat city" consumerism. A companion feature on "The Cartoon According to Sylvain Chomet" is just four minutes long—culled from the same original interview to make the extras look more copious. It´s pretty standard, though one quote from Chomet will snap a few heads. He tells how in his mind the triplets got their strength because they were built structurally "like Africans inside." He saw them as having somehow a physique similar to basketball players.

There´s also a very strange music video and three selected scenes which viewers can click on to hear commentary Chomet and others. The opening sequence was a good choice for this feature, because so much depends upon it. It´s revealing to hear Chomet talk about one of the team who wanted Astaire to wrestle with his shoes and WIN. "I think he didn´t understand the spirit of the film," Chomet remarks. The other scenes are the "restaurant performance" and "tuning the wheel," where we learn that the gruel that Mme. Souza feeds Champion is based on a childhood staple that has another production team member smacking his lips: sardines, mashed potatoes, and fish bones. Yum.

Bottom Line:
Chomet said that every one of these odd characters was inspired by people and animals he´d run across in real life. Maybe that´s why they seem like caricatures of real people instead of cardboard cartoon characters. Mme. Souza and the Triplets of Belleville are the strongest female cartoon characters since Wonder Woman. Souza has the kind of strength you associate with peasant stock, while the sisters have a resilience that their willowy bodies suggest. There may be good guys and bad guys in this animated feature, but everyone´s a grotesque. And maybe that´s as close to real life as it gets.

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