French Animation: The Triplets of Belleville ("Les triplettes de Belleville") (2003)

This is just a stunning animated film in terms of visual humor and sheer artistry.  It is hard to know where to begin, there is so much, and for me I think I'll view it a second time because it is so rich in nuance and little touches that make it a great animated film. 

The story concerns a grandmother (Madame Souza)  and her little grandson, whom she is the guardian.  In a rural area near Paris she raises him.   The film starts with her trying to discover what it is he likes.  After watching TV together with some old scratchy movie featuring a singing trio called

"The Triplets of Belleville" we see a scene seemingly out of an old newsreel, showing a series of giant fat women emerging from limousines and dragging along their scrawny husbands to see the jazz concert with Django Rhinehart, Josephine Baker in her banana getup, and Fred Astaire, who suffers a mishap and loses his shoes, which proceed to attack him and drag him off stage.

 

What he likes is riding bicycles, so his Grandmother gets him a new tricycle and he rides off happily.  She also gets him a little puppy named Bruno who likes to bark at toy trains.  Fade to black.  Years later he is a grown man and, he is competing in the Tour de France.  Paris has grown up around their country home which is now impinged on by elevated mass transit.  Bruno has grown into a big fat old dog, but still like to bark every chance he gets at the trains going by next to their little house.  

Meanwhile the grandson whose name is Champion, is training very hard for the premiere bicycle race and is nothing but skin and bones and these massive quadriceps and gastrocnemius muscles in his legs.  His grandmother rides along on a tricycle and keeps him going by blowing a whistle as he labors up the steep hills back to their home. 

Soon the Tour de France arrives and while he is wending his way over the mountain passes in the race and his grandmother is following along, still blowing her whistle in a rescue van, only the

shadowy square shouldered henchmen cause her van to have a flat and then they close in with an identical vehicle and abduct three of the leaders in the race and disappear onto a freighter before Bruno gets on their scent and they are left at the pier while the ship sails off.  So they rent a paddleboat for 1 franc for 1 hour, and follow in hot pursuit across the wide ocean.  

Surprisingly they get across and arrive in "Belleville"  a very large city with a very large green and fat statue of Liberty in the harbor.  They have no money and so are kind of stuck.  But then they meet up with the triplets of Belleville who take them in, who are still together as a singing group but much older now, and crazier than ever. 

For their supper one of them goes down to a frog pond and throws in a German style potato masher she just happens to have and blows them all sky high.  She catches a bucket of frogs and then goes home to serve them to her two sisters and their two guests from France. 

To make a long story short they form a team that tracks down her missing grandson and deals with the evil square shouldered henchmen.   It was really a cute story and I loved it.  It gained an American PG-13 rating simply because of the Josephine Baker sequence which in my estimation was pretty tame.  It is a great story for young and old.