‘The Triplets of Belleville’ is a 2003 Oscar-nominated French animated comedy film written and directed by Sylvain Chomet. This is Chomet’s first feature film and was an international co-production among companies in France, Belgium, Canada and the United Kingdom.
While French is spoken in the movie, there is hardly any dialogue—like a silent movie, the action is conveyed visually through song. This follows the story of an elderly Frenchwoman Madame Souza as she becomes involved in an international intrigue when her grandson, Champion, a professional cyclist, is kidnapped and taken abroad. Joined by her faithful dog, Bruno, she embarks on a journey to find Champion, and stumbles across unlikely allies in the form of three sisters who are veterans of the vaudeville stage.
The art style combines a nostalgic look of the 40s and 50s with an incredibly unique visual language. Aside from that this film has no dialogue, this also serves as a homage to art and music from the past. The film utilizes hand-drawn illustrations with a mixture of stop-motion, CG, and some 3D rendering techniques.
One thing that sets this film apart from other animated films is the way that coloring, scenes, and music are used to convey emotion in the absence of dialogue. In this time, there is beauty and joy in realizing that you’re watching something that is made of hand-drawn materials—things are from the scratch. It’s an obvious delight and at the same time charming because drawings should evoke feelings, the line themselves should create and make that impact for you, as all films should.
They have retained the essence of drawings, the drawn lines and blended it well with the rest of the scene even if they needed the help of computer animation for the difficult parts and of the parts that needs rendering.
If you’re the kind of person who watches international films—this film is just the right one for you. It’s an unconventional piece of filmmaking that will be considered as a classic 20 years down the line.
‘The Triplets to Belleville’ was then nominated for two Academy Awards—For Best Animated Feature, making it the first PG-13 animated film to be nominated in that category; and for Best Original Song.
