06 Jan The Triplets of Belleville
One of my favourite films is the Triplets of Belleville.
It’s an animated film (there’s not much talking in it), I think it was made by a french company.
The film is about an elderly grandmother who instills a love of cycling into her grandson at an early age, and the boy grows up to be a cycling champion. He winds up competing in the Tour de France (or a big race like this), but mysteriously vanishes half way through. It turns out that he has been kidnapped by the french mafia who have also kidnapped two other cyclists. The trio are forced to compete against each other and the weakest cyclist gets systematically assassinated. People are making bets on the cyclists in some sort of underground mafia lair.
The grandmother sets out to rescue her grandson and befriends two singing french sisters along the way. Anyways I won’t spoil the plot for you (I probably have already) but this really is a one-off film that is worth seeing.
I think my favourite thing about this film is the fantastic caricatures – the way the cartoonists have accentuated the features is both brilliant and unique. The caricatures even extend to the enormously tall ship which sets sail for Belleville. The scenes have a sense of atmosphere and sensitivity that I feel would be impossible to achieve with video from ‘real-life’.
I think my favourite scene in this film is when the grandson gets back from a truly awful training session in the rain around suburban Paris with his Grandmother (she’s always in tow on a tricycle whistling at him) and the grandmother proceeds to hoover out his exhausted muscles on the kitchen table, and whisks his crippled spine back into shape. Also I like the dog in this film, but the scenes where he’s continually running up and down the stairs and barking at the train are quite depressing and painful to watch.