I Have A Feeling We're Not In Disneyland Anymore

Through films we can gaze into our world through a window, examine ourselves, delight ourselves, and captivate ourselves. But with animation, we can experience entirely new worlds, the stuff of which is often beyond our wildest flights of fancy (or fear).

“The Triplets of Belleville” pushes the limits of creativity. In it we are transported to the lurid land of Belleville through the travels of an elderly granny, her dog, and a trio of outdated singers on a quest to retrieve a young bicyclist, abducted by the French Mafia. It is an undoubtedly peculiar story, told almost entirely without dialogue. Perhaps that is best, as the visuals are more than capable of speaking for themselves.

In Belleville, everyone is a caricature. Even their rendition of the statue of liberty mimics one of the culture’s many misdemeanors. It is an unsettlingly foreign place filled with creepy, almost nauseating people. These are the kind of characters who are funny in a way that invokes nervous giggles rather than buoyant laughter. Everyone seems to have been steeped in cigarette smoke and melancholy and they send shivers of curious fear down the spine as they leer out at you from the alleys behind their grimy apartment buildings.

A work of satirical environmental fiction, “The Triplets of Belleville” evokes a feeling of culture shock. The bourgeoisie are represented as sinister wine snobs with grotesquely bloated wine-sniffing noses and long cigarettes clenched between fetid teeth. Their minions include a waiter who has been so accustomed to his position that he has taken to bending over backwards to gratify, literally, and a squat, mousy fellow who bears a striking resemblance to a certain renowned animator. The lowerclassmen who lurk in the dingy streets are no less unsettling.

The movie is so weirdly dark, it is almost easy to miss the humor. But it is all humor, really, from the giddy parade accordion player who holds up traffic by getting jammed between her perch atop a bus and the ceiling of a tunnel, to the triplets’ unconventional (if practical) method for getting dinner. It is comedy so pitch black we are almost afraid to laugh at it.

The film opens with a sequence poking fun at the entertainment industry and the people who enjoy it. It also gives us a look at The Triplets during their golden days and their home before they became sour with time and corruption. Not that it was Candyland to begin with. This episode is reminiscent of Americana city life, hinted at by its early Disney-esque style and greyscale-induced nostalgia of times gone by.

But things have changed. The good-looking former starlets are now musty. Their majestic stage has morphed into the corners of smoke-filled nightclubs, their voices now creaky, their instruments are everyday curiosities. As they ride off into the night, the horizon peppered with neon and garbage-bin fires, we escape from the eerie, tarnished, realm of Belleville and back into our world; a place perhaps now a little more familiar and a little more estranged.