NO, REALLY. The Triplets of Belleville. Liked it. In fact I’ve been trying all day to debunk my disappointment with this movie.
The characters were kind of iconic, static, single-minded and unanalyzed except for the dog, which had a rich interior life (and a deep ambivalence about mass-transit). But it’s a cartoon, so that’s not really a valid gripe. Anyway, the dog was brilliant.
I think I could have loved The Triplets of Belleville if only I could have read the plot as an absurd allegory (or at least an anecdote) rather than an arbitrary setting for a series of inspired and surreal animation sequences. The little stuff was all so good that I kept wishing that the big stuff, the story, would turn out to be more than a place for the little stuff to happen. Asking too much? Maybe. Asking anyway.
The Triplets get: 10 points for the musical numbers, 10 points for the dog, 10 points for the frog hunting and frog-related culinary mischief, 5 points for paddle-boating, 5 points for the triplets’ apartment building and another 5 points just for going there, for a total of 45.
45 is a pretty good score. And if you only see one foreign absurdo-surreal animation film this week, better it should be The Triplets of Belleville than Tamala 2010: Punk Cat In Space. Trust me. I found out the hard way.
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