Bondage a trois

With Oscar ceremonies just a couple of weeks away, it appears that Finding Nemo, Pixar’s delightful fish story told through computer animation, has a lock on the Best Animated Film award. The abysmal Brother Bear shares one of the three nominations, as does a little-known traditionally animated film from France. While frontrunner Nemo is quality entertainment, The Triplets of Belleville is the film that deserves the prize. It is a film like no other, a masterpiece of storytelling ingenuity and artistry.

Beginning in a black-and-white, pumping Steamboat Willie-mode, three women (the triplets of the film’s title) dressed in flapper gear sing the catchiest of songs (the Oscar-nominated “The Triplets of Belleville") as dancer Josephine Baker has her clothes ripped off, and Fred Astaire is eaten by his own shoes. The images are simultaneously hilarious and grotesque, a theme that continues into the film’s main colorful story of a young French boy and his grandmother.

With little to no dialogue, we see a somber child, Champion, moping in his bedroom with a picture of what must be his dead parents hanging on the wall. His grandmother, Madame Souza, looks on with a sort of confused bemusement, wondering what she can do next to try and cheer up the tyke. She buys him a puppy, Bruno, but puppies mope and sleep a lot, so that doesn’t work. Finally, after observing Champion’s scrapbook of bicycles (and noticing that his parents are riding a bicycle in the wall picture), Souza gets the boy a tricycle, and a hobby is found.

The film jumps ahead a few years as a young adult Champion, now riding a racing cycle, trains on a rainy, severely uphill street. Madame Souza keeps pace behind him, riding Champion’s tricycle and persistently blasting him with whistle bursts. Champion makes it to the Tour de France, where he is captured by French Mafia thugs and shipped to the surreal city of Belleville, a strange combination of France and Manhattan. Madame Souza teams with the now-aged triplets to find her grandson and rescue him from slave labor, where he must peddle a bike incessantly as part of a gambling racket.

Does this sound strange? It most certainly is, and writer-director Sylvain Chomet must be commended for creating an all-time classic piece of bizarre wonderment. Triplets never lapses in its creativity, providing one astonishing image after another. The opening musical number alone stands as an Oscar-caliber short film, but it only hints at the brilliance that follows.

The hand-drawn animation is hard to describe, a sort of surreal, exaggerated motif that shows humans as freakish, often swollen beasts. (Bruno the dog even has an obvious obesity problem.) If the people in Chomet’s world aren’t overweight, they are often extremely gaunt, like Champion’s biker competition. Images of dilapidated men, their faces frozen in the shocked pain of overexertion as they heave for breath next to their abandoned bicycles, mark an animated first. The suffering bikers surely won’t inspire too many Oscar voters to eschew happy clown fish in favor of Triplets, but they will cause some viewers to stare in amazement at the comic horror that has been achieved.

The imaginative visual miracles come in a steady stream, from Champion’s oversized bulbous calves being sucked by Madame Souza’s vacuum cleaner, to the aged triplets jamming on household appliances without the extravagance of their former backing band. With the emergence of computer-animated films, traditionally drawn works have been threatened with extinction. The Triplets of Belleville is proof that the art form not only has life, but is capable of far more spectacular visions than those currently being spat out by computers.