The Triplets perform a choral swing number, Fred Astaire dances until he is swallowed by his own shoes, and Josephine Baker flaunts her iconic banana skirt. The opening sequence of The Triplets of Belleville is much more than a mere homage to 1930s aesthetics.
It feels like a fragment of vintage film resurfaced, suspended between irony and fascination, and yet — especially in 2003, the year of its release — it immediately establishes a poetic and stylistic manifesto. This is not conventional animation; it is a film off-kilter by design, destined to leave a mark.
Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and nominated for two Academy Awards (Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song), The Triplets of Belleville marks the feature-length debut of Sylvain Chomet, an acclaimed comics artist and the award-winning creator of the short The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1997).
The story follows Champion, a quiet, orphaned boy raised by his determined grandmother, Madame Souza, who lovingly supports his passion for cycling until he qualifies for the Tour de France. During the race, however, he is kidnapped by a criminal gang and taken across the ocean to the fictional city of Belleville, where he is exploited in an underground betting ring. Madame Souza, accompanied by her loyal dog Bruno and later aided by the legendary Triplets — eccentric former music-hall stars — embarks on a wild journey to rescue him.
The film stands out for its unconventional narrative structure. The filmmaker works through verbal subtraction and symbolic layering, allowing sound — in particular Benoît Charest’s César-winning jazz score — and animation to drive the storytelling. The near-total absence of dialogue (limited to brief lines in the prologue and epilogue) explicitly recalls silent cinema and the legacy of Jacques Tati, whom Chomet honours with a direct visual reference. This stylistic approach, deeply indebted to Tati’s work, would become even more pronounced in The Illusionist (2010), Chomet’s second feature film, based on an unproduced script by Tati himself and conceived as a posthumous tribute to his poetic vision.
Drawn in traditional 2D animation, with minimal digital integration, the film adopts a deliberately irregular and distorted graphic style, inspired by French caricature (bande dessinée) and visual surrealism. Characters are depicted with exaggerated features: oversized noses, grotesque bodies, eyes reduced to slits or widened to abstraction. Chomet celebrates the imperfection of the handmade line and the expressive power of drawn animation, standing in deliberate contrast to the polished realism of contemporary CGI.
Thematically, the film is built on a tapestry of visual references and cultural collisions, spanning from Fred Astaire to Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker to Glenn Gould. Yet it goes far beyond a game of intertextuality. The exploitation of athletes, urban alienation and media conformity are explored through a grotesque lens, offering a sharply critical view of contemporary society. The city of Belleville — a satirical fusion of Paris, Montreal and New York — becomes a distorted mirror of a passive, consumerist humanity, where the Statue of Liberty takes on a Botero-esque volumetric form.
Among the supporting characters, Bruno the dog stands out. Marginal at first glance, he soon becomes one of the film’s main emotional conduits. His surreal dreams, his fear of trains (linked to childhood trauma), and his unwavering loyalty make him the most relatable figure in an otherwise alien world.
The Triplets of Belleville is an unmistakable auteur statement — a film that weaves homage, critique and experimentation into a singular formal synthesis. Its strength lies in the delicate balance between grotesque, visionary characters, social commentary and sophisticated referential play, resulting in a narrative universe that is eccentric yet coherent. Twenty-two years on, it remains a rare example of harmony between aesthetic rigour, expressive freedom and political insight — still capable of surprising, moving and leaving a lasting impression.
