Les triplettes de Belleville [2003]

This opens with a scratchy, sepiatone sequence – later revealed to be the telecast of an old film – that mimics the bouncy, 'alive' style of the Fleischer Brothers' Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons, thrumming with a Parisian-styled jazz beat and introducing les Triplettes de Belleville alongside caricatures of real-life figures like Josephine Baker, Django Reinhart and Fred Astaire. It's no mere indulgence in pop culture nostalgia, in that the charm has a nightmare edge as the dancing Fred loses his living shoes, which sprout toothy mouths and chew away his legs. We pull back to find a full-colour world that nevertheless retains its brownish tinge, and to experience a full range of emotions and moods that shows a breadth of achievement rather than a scattershot of ambitions.

Sylvain Chomet's film has its streak of crudity [how many other cartoons animate an unflushed toilet?] and very black humour [les Triplettes' all-frog diet, a joke at the expense of jokes at the expense of French cuisine], alongside a melancholy that makes its leading characters more endearing than Disney cheer. There's one tiny slap at the Mouse House, in a snapshot of gruesome Americans at Disneyland, that suggests Chomet's position on the dominant modes of animated feature, but this is a rare European movie that dares poke sustained fun at the whole other side of the Atlantic rather than a few easy targets. Belleville is an amalgam of New York and Quebec, but its denizens, all grossly overweight and viciously capitalist, are obviously American, snarling rudely in English [the film has minimal dialogue, mostly in unsubtitled French]. Even the Statue of Liberty and the Oscar are represented here as grotesquely obese – though, to be equal opportunity in national caricature, French mafia bosses are wine-bibbing midgets with raspberry noses who take to the streets in an armada of elongated 2CV attack cars. This attitude is sometimes to extreme for comfort: les Triplettes, intended as heroines, are strangely witchlike and offputting, their alliance with Madame Souza seeming capricious rather than benevolent.

Belleville Rendez-Vous offers an array of animation techniques, but presents a seamless style. Its heart is with classical character and gag cartooning, but Chomet knows when to crank up the computer for touches like the cycling weather-vane atop the Souza house [a tall block that has to lean to avoid a railway line], the black and white Stephenson's Rocket in train-phobic Bruno's recurring nightmare and the swelling seas of the perilous ocean trip. The reason the movie so so intensely engaging, however, is the depth of feeling invested in its embattled, unusual family unit. First seen as a sad-eyed, Hitchcock-look pudgy child so timid he can't express his sense of loss or enthusiasm for cycling, Champion grows up to be a rangy, beaky letter S of a man, with swollen thighs and calves but a stick-figure upper body, kept in shape by unorthodox use of a vacuum cleaner and a lawn-mower as massage tools. Madame Souza, a tiny Portuguese pudding with an orthopedic shoe and a hairy lip, is tenacious and secretly tender, intuiting her grandson's passions from his hidden scrapbook, puffing on a whistle to urge him on during training exercises, absurd but dignified. The absolute antithesis of, say, Ariel or Pocahontas, she is nevertheless a far truer heroine.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Sight & Sound September 2003

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