Details
Movie Description
In this animated French film, a boy named Champion trains relentlessly for the Tour de France, with the help of his loyal grandmother and overweight dog, Bruno (who loves to bark at passing trains). When the big race comes, Champion and a few of his fellow racers are kidnapped by some box-shouldered thugs who spirit them off to Belleville (a surreal impression of 1930s-1950s Manhattan) where they are forced to pedal as part of a clandestine gambling operation. Bruno and Grandma set out across the sea in a paddle boat to rescue their boy, but once ashore they soon become lost, hungry and penniless--that is, until the frog-eating Triplets of Belleville, former scat-singing jazz prodigies turned experimental musicians, come to their rescue.
Filled with inspired, twisted imagery, this nearly dialogue-free film is a crowd-pleaser of unusual power, with the strange, measured pacing of a dream, and a great soundtrack of bizarre, alternate-reality '30s jazz. It also offers a touching and believable evocation of a dog's life. A great throwback to the time before animation became dominated by CGI effects, TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE is a very strange, very loving, and very French salute to obsession, affection, and persistence.
Film Notes
DVD Features:
Region 1
Keep Case
Widescreen
Audio:
Dolby Digital 5.1 - Natural sound/Music
Subtitles - English, Spanish - Closed Captioned
Additional Release Material:
Audio Commentary - 1. Select Scenes
Featurettes - 1. Making Of
2. ANIMATION
Music Video
Theatrical Release: NOVEMBER 26, 2003 (NY/LA)
Industry Reviews
"...[A] bracing blend of silliness and sophistication..."
Rolling Stone - Peter Travers (11/27/2003)
"...A tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity..."
New York Times - A. O. Scott (11/26/2003)
"...THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE delights in the dazzling eccentricity of its uninhibited imagination....A truly out-there piece of comic animation, the most outlandishly visual film of the year..."
Los Angeles Times - Kenneth Turan (11/26/2003)
"...Utterly original....Chomet and his team of animators hand-draw countless precise, funny, and sophisticated details..."
Entertainment Weekly - Lisa Schwarzbaum (12/05/2003)
"...Chomet blends subtle wit, visual imagination and even a flair for suspense..."
Movieline - Stephen Farber (12/01/2003)
"[T]he slyly humorous Triplets of Belleville is artful, engrossing and oddly touching."
USA Today - Claudia Puig (11/26/2003)
"[I]t is creepy, eccentric, eerie, flaky, freaky, funky, grotesque, inscrutable, kinky, kooky, magical, oddball, spooky, uncanny, uncouth and unearthly."
Chicago Sun-Times - Roger Ebert (12/26/2003)
"Comprised of nicotine-stained cells and very few words, BELLEVILLE RENDEZ-VOUS corkscrews the brain with a succession of super-skewed set-pieces..."
Total Film - Cassie Whittell (04/01/2004)
|
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
All rights reserved.
