A bizarre fairy tale from the history of animation
There’s really nothing like a big swashbuckling battle where heroes shoot rainbow-colored jets of energy out of their fists, is there? Or maybe share dramatic smooshy-wooshy kisses all over the big screen?
But possibly, just possibly, you’d like to take a break from BIGGER IS BETTER and sample the quirky, the obscure, the spidery ink line and the rainy watercolor wash?
Oh, and how about a teaspoon of horror with that?
Then why not sit down with The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville), Sylvain Chomet’s 2003 cartoon feature about a grandmother, Madame Souza, who crosses the ocean to rescue her grandson, Champion, from a gang who’s using him for their cruel and bizarre gambling games?
The story: Champion has lost his parents as a small boy and gone to live with his grandmother. Madame Souza finds one thing to cheer up the lonely orphan: cycling. As a grown man, Champion is kidnapped from a Tour-de-France-like race and taken to an ugly country, a mashup of the worst of the U.S., where he’s drugged and forced to cycle for a betting game. Madame Souza crosses the Atlantic on a paddle boat to find him, but loses the trail in Belleville, a city of hamburgers and ugly Americans.
She’s helped by three elderly music hall performers (the eponymous Triplets), who were flapper darlings back in the day but now struggle inventively with poverty (picture frog suppers, courtesy of an old-school stick grenade that one of the Triplets tosses into an industrial sludge pond, using an umbrella to shield herself from the carnage).
At last Champion is discovered and a rescue caper ensures—four old women, a fat beagle, and a couple of athletic-but-drugged cyclists against a horde of mafiosos. Who will win?
The look: If you glimpse a Sylvain Chomet flick unexpectedly, you’ll wonder if it’s a Rankin-Bass movie you’ve missed. The lines are spiky as Bilbo Baggins’ handwriting; the background is a misty color wash, almost like a sidewalk painting that’s been touched by rain.
Then look closer. That softly nostalgic look is a rope-a-dope. Chomet has a taste for the bizarre, even the downright grizzly. Cityscapes fold into an M.C. Escher-like warren of impossible structures. Foul details creep up on you under the cover of sweetness and then punch you right in the lip. Or a dizzying swarm of images swirls and goes still, and your eye focuses in, just for a moment, on something truly nasty.
You think: “Oh, too sentimental,” and then you think, “OMG WHAT did I just see and how do I unsee it?”
Case in point: la fée de l’accordéon, the accordion fairy. You see the pop musician sweetly playing in a commercial. Adorable! Then in real life. Then close up. And—are those flies crawling around her teeth? Is she dead? Has someone propped up her decaying corpse just for the spectacle? But the viewpoint sweeps past, unquestioning.
Chomet also uses CGI to nifty effect during chase and race scenes, enabling bizarre twists of focus and hyper foreshortening, though the shift from hand to computer rendering may be too obvious for contemporary tastes.
The skinny: Under the surreal imagery, The Triplets is a straight-up Joseph Campbell quest story, with Madame Souza as the hero and the Triplets as her three fairy godmothers. It’s also what we’d now, 16 years later, call an intersectional story. Madame Souza is elderly, ugly by conventional standards, socially awkward, and disabled. In fact, it’s her disability that saves the day. (But, spoilers!)
The story can be read as one long critique of consumerism and of a culture that focuses on beauty and brawn. The athletes, the cyclists, are monstrous with their bizarre muscle structures. They are also wordless. Unable to comprehend or save themselves as they’re being captured by gangsters, they go meekly along with their fate. We do hear Champion speak, but never during his career as a cyclist.
There is exactly one elegant, healthy body in the movie—Josephine Baker, in an early cartoon cameo. But she’s soon mobbed by rich white patrons who turn into monkeys at the very sight of her. Everyone else is portrayed in various degrees of awkwardness, paucity, or excess—and the more privileged the person, the more grotesque the portrayal becomes.
Casual violence is everywhere, so little noted by the narrative eye that sometimes it takes a moment to sink in. It’s the very least privileged, the elderly, disabled, and dispossessed, who show kindness, courage, and inventiveness.
But is it enough?
Is it ever enough?
Watch The Triplets of Belleville and see what you think.