The Triplets of Belleville Is A Rallying Cry For The Virtues of Hand-Drawn Animation

I've always carried a deep affinity for hand-drawn animation. I remember being the one eight-year-old on the planet who was fervently following the closure of Disney's hand-drawn animation units in 2004 and experiencing immense rage over the artform being shoved aside in the U.S. Just normal adolescent angst. Anywho, I've carried that passion for this particular artform well into adulthood and such a passion only increased in intensity thanks to a trio of first-time watches over the summer of 2019. Experiencing The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, Fantastic Planet and the subject of this review The Triplets of Belleville for the first time over the span of a few months made me further appreciate all the wonders hand-drawn animation can achieve that no other artform can quite replicate.


Writer/director Sylvain Chomet makes it clear that he's also carrying a devotion to the history of hand-drawn animation through an opening sequence set in the early 20th century and depicting a trio of female singers who are the titular Triplets of Belleville. This scene is told through a style of black-and-white hand-drawn animation evocative of Warner Bros./Betty Boop cartoons of this era. After this prologue, we move onto the story proper, which is told through minimal dialogue and carries its own distinct visual aesthetic. This story concerns Madame Souza, who takes care of her grandson, Champion, and an extremely obese pooch named Bruno. This trio live in a rickety shack dwarfed by the fast-moving world around them.

These three soon find bigger problems to face than the loud railroad tracks situated right next to their house. While competing in the Tour de Force, Champion is kidnapped by two rectangular men who were presumably the inspiration for the design of Wilson Fisk in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Souza and Bruno track Champion to Belleville where they run into elderly forms of the trio of singers seen in the prologue. This unusual ragtag group is now going to have to work together to save Bruno from the clutches of a wicked mobster who want to use Champion's biking skills to make wine until Champion dies.

Stripping away almost all dialogue from this story means The Triplets of Belleville can narrow its focus exclusively onto its visuals which tend to be the dictionary definition of "exaggerated". In the world of The Triplets of Belleville, people don't have just bellies, they have immense guts, noses aren't just larger, they're enormous and shady mechanics don't just resemble a mouse, they're basically just slightly-larger-than-usual mice. The thoroughly creative character designs of this feature are wonderfully stylized and are so much fun to watch. The rotund nature of Bruno the dog, for instance, lends itself beautifully to brief moments of comedic slapstick.

The wacky nature of the features animation style gets put to especially good use in an exciting chase scene finale that see's mafia goons constantly trying and failing to take out the protagonists. It's all a bunch of madcap mayhem that proves to be utterly delightful, particularly when it comes to gags like one evil henchman's car randomly exploding after reaching the bottom of some stairs. The Triplets of Belleville has highly amusing gags to spare and much of them come from its totally unique animation style and Chomet's ability as a director to properly execute visual-based humor. This is a humorous and sweet movie that only gets more commendable when one remembers what was going on in animation when it was released.

This film emerged in 2003, when theatrical hand-drawn animation was basically already dead in the United States and computer-animation that tried to emulate reality was on the rise. Against this backdrop, Triplets of Belleville feel like, whether intentionally or not, a rebellious crusade for the merits of using hand-drawn animation to eschew reality altogether. Could any other medium of animation properly lend Bruno's recurring dream sequence, for example, their visually unpredictable quality? Would the gorgeous backgrounds used to render the city of Belleville be properly realized in computer-animation? The Triplets of Belleville's stunning visuals make it clear that the answer to those questions is a definitive "no".