Monday, January 12, 2004

NO, REALLY. The Triplets of Belleville. Liked it. In fact I’ve been trying all day to debunk my disappointment with this movie.

The characters were kind of iconic, static, single-minded and unanalyzed except for the dog, which had a rich interior life (and a deep ambivalence about mass-transit). But it’s a cartoon, so that’s not really a valid gripe. Anyway, the dog was brilliant.

I think I could have loved The Triplets of Belleville if only I could have read the plot as an absurd allegory (or at least an anecdote) rather than an arbitrary setting for a series of inspired and surreal animation sequences. The little stuff was all so good that I kept wishing that the big stuff, the story, would turn out to be more than a place for the little stuff to happen. Asking too much? Maybe. Asking anyway.

The Triplets get: 10 points for the musical numbers, 10 points for the dog, 10 points for the frog hunting and frog-related culinary mischief, 5 points for paddle-boating, 5 points for the triplets’ apartment building and another 5 points just for going there, for a total of 45.

45 is a pretty good score. And if you only see one foreign absurdo-surreal animation film this week, better it should be The Triplets of Belleville than Tamala 2010: Punk Cat In Space. Trust me. I found out the hard way.

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