Champion races his bicycle.

French animation has been undergoing a stunning renaissance over the past decade, and for international audiences, The Triplets of Belleville is its most visible representative. Previously, the most famous animated feature from France had been RenÈ Laloux's The Fantastic Planet. Laloux's abstract political allegory, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, was a defining moment for French animation. In Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville, as in the earlier film, there is no attempt to follow Disney-esque, generic story structures or to mimic the editing or camerawork of live action. Chomet creates a rich and coherent world that moves at a delirious pace, while his visual world owes a great deal to specifically French contexts, including 1930s music, Jacques Tati, the Tour de France, poster art, and comic books. His choice of color, shapes, and settings helps produce a time and place that is at once bizarre and familiar. The Triplets of Belleville is reminiscent of Delicatessen (Caro and Jeunet, 1991): an unsettling nostalgia permeates the project, as the characters inhabit a surreal world, clutching onto a life that may have already past.

Fittingly, Chomet mixes traditional 2-D drawing with contemporary 3-D computer animation techniques, while retaining a spontaneous sense of rhythm and an artisanal, even amateurish, simplicity. In France, one can stand in front of the comic book section in any bookstore and see hundreds of individual stories and styles. Significantly, Chomet and other French animators pursue similarly auteurist routes in their movies. Thanks to features like The Triplets of Belleville, this small national industry is finding a viable niche outside of the norms of both Hollywood and Japanese anime. The Triplets of Belleville has proven the most successful export so far from this new breed of animators, many of whom are also funded by Didier Brunner's daring production company, Les Armateurs.

The story in The Triplets of Belleville unfolds in episodic form, almost like chapters in a comic book. The title sequence acts as a distinct preview, with a monochrome "performance" by three eccentric women singers, The Triplets of Belleville, belting out their raucous song "Swinging Belleville Rendez-vous," in a setting that recalls Betty Boop cartoons of the 1930s. Not only are the audience members a grotesque gallery of stereotypes, the Triplets are joined on stage by caricatures of entertainers such as Fred Astaire, guitarist Django Reinhardt, and a nearly naked Josephine Baker, whose jungle number turns the little old men in the theater into monkeys. This performance turns out to be a black-and-white television show, watched by our central characters, Mme. Souza and her grandson, Champion. Souza is trying to find some distraction to interest the melancholy boy: she tries the piano, buys him a puppy, and gives him a toy train set, until she discovers his obsession with bicycles. One of the few possessions in his room is a photo of his lost parents with a bike, which seems to motivate his fascination. Once she buys a tricycle, the story leaps ahead a decade, and the remote house is now encroached on by a noisy train trestle. Chomet is able to establish the family's new routine in a few shots: The dog Bruno barks at the commuter trains stopping outside his window, while he waits for the grown Champion to complete his bicycle training under the watchful eyes of Souza, who blows her whistle to set the pace. Once home, she feeds Champion, massages his aching muscles with a vacuum cleaner and lawn mower, and puts him to bed.

The new faces of French animation.

For the remaining two-thirds of the movie, we follow Souza, whose actions really motivate the bulk of the plot. She and Bruno ride in a van at the Tour de France, where an athletic Eddy Merckx-type rider leads the race, while Champion falls back among the three losers who give up at the back of the pack. However, a mysterious pair of thugs, who seem to have slipped out of the pages of a 1960s Mad Magazine, kidnap the three slowest riders and sail with them from Marseilles in the hold of an impossibly stylized ship. Souza and Bruno pick up the trail and follow them across the ocean, pedaling a paddleboat to Belleville/New York, in one of the most beautiful sequences of the movie, to the accompaniment of Mozart's Mass in C Minor. Chomet's story is in part about transportation; every mode is used, but mechanical means are usually sinister. The best people move on their own power.

In Belleville, a noisy city full of tall buildings and enormous citizens, the poor Souza meets the aging, eccentric singing triplets who take her in along with Bruno, who gets another train to bark at from the window. Eventually, Souza joins their nightclub act, playing the spokes on a bike wheel, and discovers that the French mafia have a bizarre club where they gamble on Champion and the other two captive bike racers, who race in front of projections of French country roads. Aided by the Triplets and their hand grenades, Souza manages to free Champion, destroy most of the French mafia, and escape Belleville, scraping and pedaling up steep streets that lead out of town aboard the bikers' sailboat-like platform. Finally, a brief epilogue reveals an aged Champion back home watching a television that shows the end of the previous scene. The story has come full circle: "It's over, grandma."

Remarkably, this story avoids any generic formulae: The lone boy does not grow up to be a champion, as his name would seem to promise. In the hands of a more commercial producer this might become an "I think I can" success story of how a lonely boy and his quirky grandmother beat the odds, triumphantly winning the Tour de France. In contrast to the unlikely young heroes of Antz (Darnell and Johnson, 1998) or Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (Davis, 2001), Champion is neither clever nor ambitious. Instead, Chomet's Champion receives even less screen time and character development than the dog-at least we get to see Bruno's dreams. The elongated, exhausted Champion remains a cartoonish character, a mute descendant of both Winsor McCay's animated mosquitoes and Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot. Champion begins and ends the story dependent upon his grandmother. But it is precisely this refusal to Disney-fy the story into a childish fable that preserves the film's interest. Rather than follow the generic rise of a lonely child into a new hero of French bicycling, the movie skips from engaging scene to scene, much like a silent cartoon. As in Felix the Cat, characters simply see a situation and act upon it without reflecting or clarifying any motives. Thus, while the basic plot summary would seem to suggest clear parallels with Finding Nemo (Stanton and Unkrich, 2003)-after all, a concerned relative crosses a great distance, making eccentric friends along the way, to rescue a kidnapped child-The Triplets of Belleville fails to exploit the generic devices that make Pixar's movie so classical. For instance, Chomet spends a great deal of time on how the aging Triplets catch and eat their frog dinners, but never bothers to communicate the thoughts or feelings of the captured Champion.

Further, The Triplets of Belleville populates its world with memorable characters who have only minimal roles in advancing the plot. There is the terrific driver of the van, who chews his cigarette, hunches up, and has to endure the looks and whistle-blasts of Souza's scorn; a paddle-boat operator anxiously awaiting his boat's return; a bloated Belleville boy scout who tries to help a defiant Souza cross the street; and the most ingratiating waiter in the world, attending to the mafioso's table. Every scene has a surprisingly clever minor figure burst forth. This sort of narrative construction owes more to the history of the European art cinema than it does to the history of commercial animation. The story meanders, seasons pass, and the seemingly inconsequential events of watching a passing train rattle the house or listening to the sounds of tadpoles popping like corn in the Triplets' pot gradually preoccupy the viewer.

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