366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

AKA Belleville Rendez-vous (UK theatrical release)

“Don’t want to end my days in Acapulco
Stiff as a board, dancing the tango.
I’d love to be twisted, utterly twisted,
Twisted like a triplet from Belleville.

Swinging Belleville rendez-vous,
Marathon dancing doop dee doo.
Voodoo can can, balais taboo,
Au Belleville swinging rendez-vous…”
–English lyrics from “The Triplets of Belleville”

DIRECTED BY: Sylvain Chomet

FEATURING: There are voice actors, but the film is nearly silent

PLOT: An indefatigable old woman tries to rescue her cyclist grandson from the clutches of the mafia, with the help of her train-hating dog and a long-forgotten, frog-eating trio of Depression-era superstar singing sisters.

BACKGROUND:

• Nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Animated Feature (the first PG-13-rated movie ever nominated in the category, it lost to Finding Nemo) and Best Song (which fell victim to that year’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King juggernaut).
• Writer-director Chomet began his career as a comic strip artist. His first animated film, The Old Lady and the Pigeons, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. The stars of that film make a cameo appearance here.
• Composer Benoit Charest’s score actually utilizes some of the fanciful instruments that appear onscreen, such as newspaper, refrigerator shelves, and a canister vacuum cleaner.
• Although mostly animated traditionally, Chomet used 3-D computer animation for machines, such as cars and bicycles, which he argued would be too boring to animate properly by hand.
• Gypsy-jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (an obvious inspiration for the music who has an animated cameo in the film’s first scene) recorded a song titled “Belleville” in 1942. The Triplets themselves suggest the three Andrews Sisters, whose popularity peaked in the 1940s.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: For a film built on memorable imagery, picking one is difficult choice. A tiny pedal boat chasing an enormous ship across a storm-tossed ocean? The explosive geyser that creates its own rain of frogs, or the gourmet meal that results? The city of Belleville, all enormous buildings and a fat Statue of Liberty hoisting a burger? A strong argument for each of them, but I’ll go with the monochromatic dreams of Bruno the dog, who imagines a dreamworld railroad in which he is towed by his master around the rim of a gargantuan food dish.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The film delicately blends a thoroughly unpredictable storyline, an artistic style at once beautiful and grotesque, and a fierce sentimental streak. Any one of these elements alone could have been off-putting, but Chomet pulls off the delicate balancing act, managing to capture the heartwarming ugliness of a cartoon by Charles Addams or Ronald Searle. As a result, truly bizarre moments arouse a sense of wonder rather than repulsion.

Original trailer from The Triplets of Belleville

COMMENTS: That plot description up there? Provides absolutely no insight into the twists and Continue reading 118. THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE [LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE] (2003) →