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With the exception of some sound effects work, musical cues, and a repeated song-and-dance number, The Triplets of Belleville is a deliriously strange, nearly silent animated film. It’s the kind of whimsy and charm that could only come from the French. While I enjoyed the grotesquery of the animation and character design, but the plot left me a little cold. Or well, it left me cold until the titular sisters showed up.
Despite being named for them, they’re really a supporting act to the main players. The Triplets of Belleville opens with a crudely drawn black-and-white prologue, introducing us to the triplets and throwing in animated cameos from the likes of Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt. This opening is absolutely bewildering, yet enticing. I wanted to follow these strange looking sisters around, getting to know everything about them, and their lives in the music hall. But the film is not content with spending time with them.
After this prologue we flash forward, and we’re now in our main plot, a story about an elderly woman, her dog, and her grandson, who is training to participate in the Tour de France. He gets kidnapped by gangsters, and his grandmother and faithful (elderly) dog go searching for him, by chance happen to meet the triplets, and join forces to find and rescue the grandson. Of course they succeed, and the film ends in a particularly well-done car chase, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the entire thing by the time it ended.
The colors were beautiful, the animation fluid and smooth, the character designs were very angular and tip-toeing towards the fine line between highly stylized and slightly grotesque, but the story just didn’t interest me much when it moved focus away from the triplets. They are a merry band of strange old birds when we reunite with them. No longer the big stars of a music hall or vaudeville stage, but improvisational street musicians who live out in the swamps and dine on frogs. Theirs is a magical, whimsical world, and it’s a shame we didn’t spend more time getting to know the minute details of it.
Having said all of that, I still recommend The Triplets of Belleville very highly, even if I didn’t love it. Perhaps the introductory passage and title gave me higher hopes than I should have had for the contents of the story, I don’t know. There’s still so much good here, and that song! “Belleville Rendez-vous” was stuck in my head for days after watching this, it’s so quirky, with a fun sense of melody and inventive use of percussion. Pity that it lost Best Original Song to the mammoth victory lap of the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
