Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003)

HD rip | 81 min | XviD 720x432 | 1900 kb/s | 141 kb/s mp3 VBR | 23.97 fps | 1.15 GB + 3% recovery

French | Subtitles: English, Spanish and Portuguese .srt | Genre: Animation/Comedy

When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters--an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire--to rescue him.

The Triplets of Belleville, the first feature film by Sylvan Chomet, surely belongs in the second category. Mr. Chomet's is a universe of sheer impossibility, where size, proportion and balance are ruled by the whims of his perverse pen and peculiar imagination. Although that imagination has evidently been fed by sources as various as Betty Boop, Jacques Tati and European comic books, its products are too strange to be assimilated into any known tradition. ''The Triplets,'' which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, may be the oddest movie of the year, by turns sweet and sinister, insouciant and grotesque, invitingly funny and forbiddingly dark. It may also be one of the best, a tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity.

The film's two lines of intelligible dialogue have been dubbed into English since it was shown, to rapturous applause, at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Its sensibility, however, remains irreducibly French, and it may confuse audiences used to the cuddly multicultural moralism that defines American feature-length animation. The overture is a black-and-white spectacle: naughty, exuberant and a little creepy. It evokes Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire (eaten by his own shoes) and introduces the Triplets of the title, a trio of gangly, cloche-wearing scat singers. (They sing the movie's theme song, a swinging piece of nonsense likely to stick in your head for hours after you leave the theater.)

These celebrities turn out to be images flickering on a battered television set that belongs to Madame Souza, an old woman with thick glasses and orthopedic shoes who lives in a rickety building with her orphaned grandson, Champion. He is a gloomy, tubby boy who smiles only when his grandmother presents him with a tricycle, a gift that foreshadows his eventual transformation into a gaunt, sad-eyed Tour de France bicyclist with hypertrophied calves and thighs. The story is too bizarre and wonderful to summarize, but it leads Madame Souza to Belleville, a Manhattan-like dream city populated by obese hamburger eaters, cretinous Boy Scouts, and a diminutive red-nosed French mafia chieftain. Belleville (not to be confused with the Paris neighborhood of the same name) is also the home of the Triplets, now ancient, who subsist entirely on frogs and frog byproducts and who make infectious music out of household appliances and carefully preserved newspapers.

''The Triplets'' is a similar collage of the found and the invented. Its style evokes a postwar France making its stubborn, eccentric way into the modern world, a nation of chain-smoking truck drivers and accordion-squeezing pop singers, presided over by Charles de Gaulle, whose beaked, chinless profile is mirrored in many of the film's faces, including Champion's. Mr. Chomet, who dedicated the film to his parents, clearly feels some nostalgia for the mixture of worldliness and parochialism that defined the bygone France. And it is possible to detect, in his view of the fleshy Bellevilleans, a whiff of Gallic disdain for the gigantism of American culture. The twisting of cultural stereotypes has long been part of the cartoon heritage; think of the amorous Pepe le Peu, for example. In any case the tether that connects Mr. Chomet's imagined world with the real one is long and loose. He is a master of surprise, terror, silliness and sheer eccentricity, and this compact movie is stuffed nearly to bursting with astounding sequences: Madame Souza setting out in the moonlight, by pedal boat, in the wake of a giant ocean liner; her dog, Bruno, dreaming in black and white; one of the triplets hunting frogs with an hand grenade.

I could go on, and it is likely that before too long, bits and pieces of ''The Triplets'' will find their way into the cartoon lexicon. Best to see this curious and captivating film now, before some of its vivid strangeness fades into familiarity. (A. O. Scott, NYT)

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La trillizas de Belleville

Campeón es un niño pequeño y melancólico, adoptado por su abuelita, la señora Souza. Cuando ésta descubre su pasión por el ciclismo, apunta a Campeón en unos entrenamientos muy duros. Pasan los años. Campeón llega a ser un as de la bicicleta y participa en el Tour de Francia. Pero dos hombres misteriosos vestidos de negro lo raptan durante la carrera. La señora Souza y su fiel perro, Bruno, van a buscarlo y llegan al otro lado del océano, a una megápolis denominada Belleville. Allí se encuentran con las trillizas de Belleville, estrellas excéntricas del music-hall de los años 30, que deciden proteger a la señora Souza y a Bruno. El olfato de Bruno descubre el rastro de Campeón. ¿Lograrán vencer los terribles planes de la poderosa mafia francesa?

Champion est un petit garçon mélancolique adopté par sa grand-mère, Madame Souza. Remarquant sa passion pour le cyclisme, celle-ci fait suivre à Champion un entraînement acharné. Les années passent. Champion est devenu un as de la « petite reine », à tel point qu’il se retrouve coureur du célèbre Tour de France, mais pendant la course, il est enlevé par deux mystérieux hommes en noir. Madame Souza et son fidèle chien Bruno partent alors à sa recherche. Leur quête les mène de l’autre côté de l’Océan, jusqu’à une mégalopole nommée Belleville. Là, ils rencontrent les « Triplettes de Belleville », d’excentriques stars du music-hall des années 30 qui décident de prendre Madame Souza et Bruno sous leur aile. Grâce au flair de Bruno, ils se lancent sur les traces de Champion. Réussiront-ils à déjouer les plans de la puissante mafia française ?

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