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Rating:
A wonderful surprise from 2003, this "The Triplets of Belleville" by Sylvain Chomet (a former comic book artist and joyfully lent to us by animated cinema). A film that collected numerous awards, receiving honors at Cannes and even the highest recognition in the field of animated cinema at the Annecy Festival.
A well-deserved award for the delicate beauty of the drawings, with an innovative style yet indebted to a certain early-century animation (it’s no coincidence that references to the early 1920s are frequent and even functional to the story). But if the drawings (far from the roundness and bright, clean Walt Disney colors) are the central axis of this film, we can say the same about the screenplay and the story, truly written with masterful succession of gags and jokes (both visual and verbal) from the textbook.
A sort of noir-tinted road movie, set during the Tour de France (yes, the nationalism of the French is legendary, and everyone knows it by now!) where it tells the story of a grandmother (Madame Souza) who, with her trusty Bruno (a clever and sharp dog), sets out in search of her grandson (Champion), a competitor in the race, who has been kidnapped during the world's most important cycling race.
A long chase by sea (the scenes of the ship crossing the Ocean are beautiful) and land that will lead the two to join Les Triplettes (an irresistible trio of old spinster singers from the Variety show now in the twilight of the 1930s, who in one scene evoke the ancient glories with caricatured citations of Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker, and Fred Astaire… a truly superb scene!). The group will track down the kidnapped cyclist (along with two others purely for show) from fearsome thugs, and will dismantle their dreams of world domination (a reference to the Nazism of the era is all too evident!).
An impeccable film, at times hilarious that has little or nothing to envy of brilliant "live-action" comedies of the same genre and that encapsulates within itself an endless series of citations, must-see gags, and brilliant ideas, calibrated and scattered almost perfectly throughout the nearly 80 minutes of the film, with memorable and well-characterized characters (the dog Bruno, with his "almost" human psyche and the carefree Triplets in the first place) but without excessive psychological insights, rarely addressed in a cartoon of this kind, even if this underlying froideur makes it seem "slightly snobbish" overall.
A truly beautiful, entertaining, and refined film, just long enough not to be tiring or pedantic, and above all, another demonstration of the fact that animated cinema has finally emerged from the "children's film" ghetto and can be a spokesperson for a certain way of storytelling otherwise impossible to represent with real or live-action actors.
Recommended for those who love a certain kind of animated cinema…
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