redbird: Edward Gorey picture of a bicyclist on a high wirer (gorey bicycle)
([personal profile] redbird Dec. 19th, 2003 09:01 pm)
I'm hesitant to recommend this, since it's probably not playing where you live. Nonetheless:

The Triplets of Belleville is a delightful cartoon adventure. It's French (actually a French/Belgian/Canadian co-production, with some work done in Riga), but there's almost no dialogue, so I suspect it wouldn't have mattered much if we'd gotten the French rather than the English-language version. The background text--signs, newspapers, a newscast--is in French, and I understood enough to be pleased, at the end, that I had correctly interpreted who "Le President" was and, thus, the approximate time at which the movie is set.

Les Triplettes are a dance act, who we see at the beginning of the movie. The scene then shifts to a mother-and-son. She buys him two important gifts: a dog and a tricycle. He grows up to be a competitive cyclist, and the dog gets big and strong, and obsessed with trains.

The animation is excellent, both the more-or-less ordinary events and the adventures. Belleville deserves its name: it's both genuinely beautiful and genuinely urban. There's a wonderful chase scene, featuring some impressively square-shouldered villains. There are many frogs.
.

About Me

redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
Redbird

Most-used tags

Powered by Dreamwidth Studios

Style credit

Expand cut tags

No cut tags