The Triplet’s of Belleville launches onto screens with a rollicking tribute to vintage vaudeville stage entertainment and the hyperkinetic animation stylings of Tex Avery. The titular Triplets bop and mince through their Oscar nominated tune Belleville Rendez-Vous as an audience of monstrously fat women and their tiny monkey-like spouses groove in their seats. A topless Josephine Baker does her infamous banana dance and the audience, literally, goes wild. It sets the scene, even if it is set in the past, and soon we realize we’re watching it on television with a morose old woman, with a wandering eye, and her little son.

The film shifts and shows the old lady’s attempts to interest her boy in something, anything. He’s a vapid little thing. She begins with a new puppy and then with a tricycle. Both succeed in their own way.

Then we fast-forward to the future.

The dog is spindly-legged and obese, obsessively following a routine that involves scrambling up three floors to the bedroom window to bark vainly at each passing train. The boy has become a cyclist, with fish-like eyes on either side of his head, a nose like a knife, a spindly upper-body, and legs grotesquely over-muscled. His mother follows behind on the tricycle, with a whistle in her mouth, setting his pace.

So much story is told through exaggeration, grotesque images, ample and surprisingly well-timed humor, and superb characterization, thereﾒs no need at all for subtitles in this very French film. Why? There’s almost no dialogue whatsoever. Just imagery, humor, and a refreshing sense that anything can happen followed by the joy of watching as anything does happen.

The boy participates in the Tour de France and he’s kidnapped by a pair of black-suited identical villains. They look like cigarette smoking living zoot suits. With sharp rectangular bodies and heads set at chest level. His mother and the intrepid hound pursue them across the ocean via a paddle boat and they end up in Belleville, an obvious stand in for New York City as evidenced by the obese Statue of Liberty in the harbor. The fact that every citizen on Bellevilleﾒs streets is hyper-obese is just one successful satire, as is the spineless maitre-de in the Jazz club. His neck moves forward and back, his smile threatens to severe his head cleanly at its center, making him the very model of obsequiousness. In Belleville the mother connects with the now geriatric Triplets, who still perform their act (only with considerably more innovation now) and subsist on a diet of frogs obtained by a liberal use of WWII era Axis hand grenades.

With no dialogue whatsoever the film manages to give motive to its villains, character to its heroes, and leaves a smile on your face throughout. The movie ends with an extended chase scene that never fails to surprise. This is a work of art, a monument to storytelling economy, and a simple story like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Watch as France, Canada and Belgium team up to wrest away innovation from Japan’s reigning adult animation studios and put even Pixar and Disney to shameﾅ and bop along with the groovy soundtrack as you go.

Kid Factor: Though a cartoon, this film is not for young kids. They’ll love the humor and there’s nothing really offensive, but the pacing is slow, the satire is way above their heads, and the innovative violence goes just a hair beyond slapstick into something more shocking. There are a pair of wildly swinging bare breasts, in the beginning, and the monkey men are driven so by lust to swarm her for her bananas, and the sonﾒs single minded bicycle obsession is a bit frightening. Older kids might get it, or at least laugh a few times, but odds are theyﾒll just walk out of the room declaring the film too weird to watch. That’s not a bad thing. This is way beyond the way Hollywood is content to tell its stories, and that’s just another thing that makes these Triplets a trio you’ll want to visit again and again.

Rated PG

Tags: Movies with Children