Les Triplettes de Belleville

The Film

Note: this section of the review is largely the same as what I wrote for the standard definition DVD release back in 2004.

Until I saw Les Triplettes de Belleville (released as Belleville Rendez-vous in the UK and The Triplets of Belleville in the US), I had never heard of director Sylvain Chomet. His previous claim to fame is La Vieille Dame et les Pigeons, a short piece of animation that displays, albeit in a more simplistic form, many of Belleville’s hallmarks. Widely marketed as a French film, this French-Belgian-Canadian co-production with partial UK funding was largely animated in a cramped office in Montréal with a skeleton crew working with outdated technology and very little room for error. The results are, quite frankly, astounding.

The story is a relatively lightweight affair, and is strictly there to support the artwork and gags rather than the other way round. Madame Souza is rigorously training her grandson, Champion, for the Tour de France. During the Tour, Champion and two other cyclists are kidnapped by members of the French Mafia and taken to the city of Belleville, a place that looks like New York, Montréal and Paris combined, where they will be made to cycle until they collapse, with members of the Mafia taking bets on who will be the only survivor. Meanwhile, with her overweight dog Bruno in tow, Madame Souza follows her grandson’s captors to Belleville and enlists the aid of three old hags who were formerly immensely popular singers (the “Triplettes” of the title).


Intriguingly, the film manages to convey information without any real use of dialogue. There are at most four lines in the entire film, and none of them play any real part in the story. The pacing is very slow, never going anywhere in hurry, and with even the more tense sequences drifting by without any real sense of urgency. As such, this is definitely going to irritate those with short attention spans, and the first time I saw it, I have to admit I felt there were moments that plodded. For me at least, however, the film definitely improved with a second viewing. When I first saw it, the deliberately slow pace worked against it, because I wanted to know what would happen next but found myself waiting too long for the results. On subsequent viewings, with a prior knowledge about what is going to happen, the film is much more enjoyable because the atmosphere, visuals and jokes can be appreciated to their full extent. In particular, a number of background jibes are much more noticeable when seen for the second time, such as a piece of excrement floating in a toilet bowl that is shaped like Mickey Mouse’s ears.

Belleville makes its influences clear. Stylistically, it adheres more to the look of the political cartoons found in broadsheets than to the overly cleaned-up look of, for example, Disney’s more recent works. The outlines of the characters are deliberately rough and penciled (recalling Disney’s Xerox period, when films like One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Jungle Book were produced), and both the designs and movements are heavily caricatured. Much of the comedy recalls the works of Jacques Tati, and at one point a poster for M. Hulot’s Holiday can even be seen on a wall. Realism is the last thing on Chomet’s mind with this film, with all the characters and even the settings being exaggerated to the point of being bizarre, with designs that border on the grotesque. The French characters are given large noses and elongated features, and the Americans look more like over-inflated balloons than people. It definitely makes a nice change to see an animated film that embraces the fact that it is a cartoon rather than trying to ape real life. It’s definitely a world away from the bland style Dreamworks applies to all of its traditionally animated features.


It’s also nice to see a 2D-animated film in an age increasingly oversaturated by CG. That’s not to say that there isn’t any 3D animation in Belleville - vehicles and some shots of the cyclists make are computer generated - but generally they are used sparingly, and are relatively unobtrusive, even if they don’t always fit in 100% with the 2D animation. For one thing, the 3D objects lack the rough edges of the hand-drawn animation, and their movement sometimes comes across as a little too smooth and pre-planned than the often unpredictable and quirky 2D. The use of 3D was definitely a necessary evil, especially considering how small the production crew was for this film, but at times it certainly appears to be more of a time-saving device than anything: especially in the case of the cyclists, it often seems that 2D animation could have been used to better effect.

It’s actually surprisingly difficult to review a film like this. The experience is so visceral that it’s impossible to explain its impact in words. Les Triplettes de Belleville is, overall, a very interesting and unique piece of work. Les Triplettes de Belleville is, overall, a very interesting and unique film. If it doesn’t win you over the first time, persevere, because there is a lot to be appreciated from this. It manages to combine a childish curiosity with more adult cynicism, and I was personally quite disappointed when it failed to take home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 2004 Academy Awards.

HD DVD Presentation

For this HD DVD release, France Télévisions Éditions have presented the film in 1080p in its original 1.66:1 aspect ratio, which already constitutes a considerable improvement on the standard definition release, which was over-matted to 1.78:1. This VC-1 encode is excellent, boasting a very impressive level of detail. Many people are under the rather bizarre misconception that animation doesn't benefit from HD as much as live action, but my opinion has always been that this is not the case, and would even go as far as to say that the exact opposite may be true, with the decidedly hand-made nature of animation actually allowing for more detail to be glimpsed in high definition presentations than their live action counterparts. As one of a very small number of traditionally animated features available in HD, I'm extremely glad that Les Triplettes de Belleville has not let the side down. The only downside is that, by restricting this release to a single layer HD15, with just over 9 gigabytes given over to the film itself, some compression artefacts are visible during some of the more visually complex shots. Generally speaking, the artefacts are not particularly noticeable during normal playback, but, when pausing the image, they become more visible.

Whereas the French DVD release came with separate Dolby Digital 5.1 and uncompressed PCM 2.0 audio tracks, the HD DVD features a single DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. Given the lack of equipment that can decode the high definition portion of DTS-HD Master Audio tracks, I had to settle for the included legacy DTS 1.5 Mbps stream, which to my ears sounded excellent. Belleville is a decidedly musical cartoon, and both the score and the catchy theme song are represented well. The bass is nice and deep – best shown during the thunderstorm when Madame Souza is crossing the ocean (which is set to Mozart's Requiem), and the rears are given some nice work to do with ambient effects and music, such as during the black and white opening sequence, in which the light whir of a projector can be heard, appropriately enough, behind you.

There are no subtitles, but, given that there are only a three or four lines of dialogue in the entire film, this isn't exactly a problem.

Extras

Impressively, France Télévisions Éditions have ported over the entire contents of the earlier 2-disc standard definition DVD release. Most of the various featurettes have been sourced from PAL material, but have been standards converted to NTSC and deinterlaced, which unfortunately hampers the presentation somewhat.

Making of - Entitled Les Triplettes... Le futur antérieur de l'animation?, this 36-minute documentary interviews director Sylvain Chomet, Belgian chief animator Benoît Féroumont and 3D effects animator Pieter Van Houte in some considerable detail. My French isn’t good enough to catch everything they say, but from what I can gather this is a very good documentary. It is comprised almost entirely of interview footage with very little in terms of clips of the film. The three men interviewed are candid and matter of fact about the production, talking about how successful they feel the film is as a whole.

Music video - This bizarre little video features a rather odd-looking fellow called M who dances to one of the songs from the film, and at times even interacts with actual film footage as a cartoon version of himself. It’s very, very quirky and very, very French.

Making of the music video – featurette - This relatively uninteresting 3-minute featurette shows how the music video was created.

Animation by Sylvain Chomet - A personal favourite of mine, this brief 4-minute featurette is basically Chomet sitting at his kitchen table talking about his philosophy on animation character design, backing it all up with on-the-fly drawing demonstrations.

Le temps d'un tournage - Running for approximately 6 minutes, this made-for-TV promotional piece is quite interesting for the amount of rough animation it shows, as well as the cramped working conditions of the animators’ Montréal office.

Commentary on three scenes - It’s a shame Sylvain Chomet didn’t record a feature-length commentary, as he had plenty to say about the three scenes provided here: the black and white opening, the Triplettes’ nightclub performance, and a scene near the start that runs after Madame Souza and Champion return home from a night of training. Chomet talks a lot about technique and the atmosphere of each piece, but once again I’m afraid my French simply isn’t good enough to catch everything he says.

Interviews - Four interviews are featured, including Antoine de Caunes (probably best known to many British viewers as the presenter of Eurotrash but an established cyclist, actor and director in his own right), singer “M”, artist Michel Ocelot and American animator Bill Plymton (who speaks in English with French subtitles). They essentially give their opinions of Les Triplettes de Belleville, which are often quite interesting.

The theatrical trailer and teaser trailer are also included.

Gallery - This gallery is more than a little pointless, since the images all have an annoying interlaced TV effect overlaid on top of them. I believe higher quality versions of most of these images can be found on the film’s official web site, anyway, not to mention by simply pausing the film itself. On this release, the gallery is presented in high definition.

Overall

Special bonus! Click the image above to view the full 1080p frame!
It's great to see more traditional animation becoming available in high definition, particularly when it's a film as good as Les Triplettes de Belleville. With its solid audio-visual presentation, this release is a must-have for HD DVD-ready animation aficionados.