Designer & bike rider in British Columbia, Canada

Triplets of Belleville

Saw this acclaimed (by critics and friends) animated film, a Canadian-Belgium-France collaboration now nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, at the Odeon the other night.
Narrative synopsis, with possible spoilers: a quiet French orphan boy and his petite Grandmother, who buys him a tricycle to encourage his harbored fascination with heroes of the Tour de France. Cut to Grandma, who’s the real gem in this film, as coach, and boy as adult athlete and now competitor in the Tour. More comment in a sec on why the film, despite its charming potential (narratively and visually), fails after this point.


Soon the French Mafia kidnaps him and two other racers, ships them to Belleville, USA, where they’re kept in a cell and forced at gunpoint to race stationary bikes for gangster gamblers.
Animation synopsis: A pre-war style throughout, reflecting the decorative designs of Parisian Art Nouveau and the exaggeration and free play of American Jazz, to which the three title characters live, breath and perform (also more on this in a bit). Rich, watercolour earth tones occasionally interjected with well-blended layers of CG. See the scene where Grandma, in pursuit of the giant steamer ship that has kidnapped her cyclist, crosses the Atlantic in a rented peddle boat, conquering giant swells of CG waves and storms. Or the Gumby-like French waiter, past the point of merely looking down his nose at diners to be literally bent in half taking their orders. Best of all, the transition of the boy from a pudgy, doe-eyed beach ball to obsessed bicycle engine, his skeletal frame hanging with magnificently monstrous leg muscles, which his Grandma ritually messages with egg beaters, lawnmowers and horse brushes (last item I’ll soon get to, honest).
So what doesn’t work here? Well, to address my first point, the halfway turn the plot takes. Up to this point we’ve totally connected with sweet Grammy, her dwarfish character, stumped leg and utter dedication to the boy. The way the film communicates her love and admiration through simple gestures like adjusting her glasses or blowing on her coach’s whistle, and without a stitch of dialogue, which can be said for the entire production. And the boy inspires us with his own development. I come to the film with a cycling background, so seeing him put in long hours in the rain, up 45 degree cobbled streets, passing traffic, regimenting his diet, was great fun and even poignant. But this is where our boy’s development is arrested, and remains static, for the rest of the film. He’s relegated as 2-D device to propel the mediocre action, an object for which plays out the battle between the mafia and Grandma.
Regrettable, this sidelining, but perhaps necessary as the second half and thus my second point explores the mystery of the title characters, these hag Jazz sisters well beyond their prime, living a life of bizarre poverty that Grandma becomes involved in. We don’t know who these triple enigmas are, except that they used to be famous and now perform a found-object beat improve at an avant-garde nightclub. The film feels content to leave it at that, but expects us to go along with them through the (anti)climatic slow motion chase scene, where the ingenuity, wit and outrageousness so promised us by the film’s first half (my vote for the best scene involves Grandma, a flat tire, and a dog) gives way to throwing hats at chasing cars that then, wow, drive off the road.
My last promised point about the film, the horse analogy, remains anomalous to the general plot, or perhaps the plot anomalous to it. So it’s interesting the way the grandson, his fellow riders, and perhaps sporting in general, are overtly depicted as slaves and animals to their endeavors. The boy is first engaged in innocent hero worship via the glamorous media depictions of the Tour, which the film represents using actual newspaper clipping of the greats, like Fausto Coppi. With misguided encouragement from this and benign support from Grandma, the boy develops a single purpose: to ride. When he dismounts his ridiculous muscles from the bike, he literally trots like a horse rearing on two legs, the clapity-clap of hoof sounds and all. Hunched up on all fours, Grandma then grooms him with horse brushes. In captivity with the other two cyclists emanate the sounds of a horse stable. The cyclist who wins the Tour, gianormous white horse teeth, is depicted as a shining media star on the podium. In fact, all the cyclists are unemotional animals, suffering up the mountains of the race, many collapsing from their bikes and locked into the broom wagon. During the gambling scene one of cyclists falls from his stationary stead, wheezing with exhaustion, to be quickly


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3 Responses to “Triplets of Belleville”

  1. Film Police Avatar
    Film Police

    Bellevile! Belleville!!

  2. Jeff Werner Avatar

    Whoa, thanks for that FP. Change made (with two ‘L’s). I shouldn’t have so willingly trusted the search results on Google with my first, incorrect spelling.

  3. Gyregimbler Avatar
    Gyregimbler

    Dear Jeff, I have just seen this film on DVD (in August 2006) and I am baffled by it. Is this some thinly-disguised allegory about the decline of French riders in the Tour? and the hijacking of success by an American rider? What are the IV lines of vin rouge? Why the fat hamburger-fed Americans, and why the gross-out frog-gobbling scenes for the French? Why ridicule Josephine Baker, and what has Fred Astaire done to deserve he gets? The plot falls apart in such a sad way – this hit me as a feel-bad movie. And I get a big kick out of the Tour de France and have for years . . . .

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