Les Triplettes de Belleville

Bomb Rating: 

The intent here is obvious: Make everything as weird as possible and pass it off as art.

Leave it to the French to screw up animation and make it even more incomprehensible than their behavior and their politics. This is the type of film that you can leave for five minutes, come back, and not be sure whether you're watching the same movie.

Everybody is kind of lumpy or elongated in "The Triplets of Belleville," as though a kid had been playing with a Stretch Armstrong for too long. The story involves the grandson of Madame Souza. He's training for the Tour de France and she's helping him. Right in the middle of the race, he's kidnapped by the French Mafia and taken away to the town of Belleville, where he's made to provide pedal power for a machine. That leaves Madame Souza and her dog Bruno to rescue him.

There's a lot of grotesque animation here and not a lot of dialogue, which means that if you want to figure anything out, you have to take your eyes off the weirdness long enough to pay attention to the underlying story. Unfortunately, that story goes off on some tangent every few minutes, making it virtually impossible to figure out where this mish-mash of ideas is going.

The intent here is obvious: Make everything as weird as possible and pass it off as art. Maybe that works in France, but in the rest of the world, it's seen as the trash that it is.

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