Of the adapted reviews below, only Philip French's reveals much of the story.

There is not even a way I can tell you what the film is "like," because I can't think of another film "like" it. Maybe the British cartoonists Ronald Searle and Gerald Scarfe suggest the visual style. Sylvain Chomet, the writer and director, has created an animated feature of appalling originality and scary charm. It's one of those movies where you keep banging your fist against your head to stop yourself from using the word meets, as in Monsieur Hulot meets Tim Burton, or the Marquis de Sade meets Lance Armstrong. Most animated features have an almost grotesque desire to be loved. This one doesn't seem to care. It creates a world of selfishness, cruelty, corruption and futility -- but it's not serious about this world and it doesn't want to attack it or improve upon it. It simply wants to sweep us up in its dark comic vision.

The movie's drawing style is haunting in a comic way, but the energy of the story is inexorable. There is a concert which involves tuning bicycle wheels. Luis Bunuel wrote that when he and Salvador Dali were about to premiere their surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, he loaded his pockets with stones to throw at the audience in case it attacked. How can I best describe Belleville other than to suggest that Bunuel might have wanted to stone it? Some of my faithful readers went to see Songs from the Second Floor on my recommendation. Belleville Rendez-Vous comes from a similar mindset, but is told in a manic fever, and is animated. Imagine Felix the Cat with firecrackers tied to his tail, in a story involving the French nephew and aunt of the Reservoir Dogs, and a score by Spike Jones. No, the other Spike Jones.

Sylvain Chomet's thoroughly delightful animated feature is touching, hilarious and so French you can taste it. It playfully alludes to Jacques Tati, and lightly sports influences from Betty Boop to Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians, but it really is one of the most bracingly original things I have seen for a long time.

A young orphan boy, Champion, loves to watch TV, especially broadcasts by a red-hot jazz singing trio, The Triplettes of Belleville, who belt out their toe-tapping numbers in the irresistible style of Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club de France. Once grown up, Champion is a Tour de France racer but things turn out most oddly for him. Belleville Rendez-Vous has the pungent, gamey quality of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie, but its innocence and charm are less contrived. The animation itself is superbly detailed and vividly eccentric, and as for the story it's impossible to tell if it's a children's story for adults or an adult's story for children. Or if it matters. I was beguiled from the first second.

With contributions from teams of animators based in France, Belgium and Latvia, Belleville Rendezvous (aka Les Triplettes de Belleville) is clearly the product of a single controlling imagination, that of the French comic-strip artist and filmmaker Sylvain Chomet, whose first feature this is. It is a pleasant change from, or antidote to, the current wave of bland, airbrushed, computer-generated animated movies from the States.

The film gets off to a great start with a comic tribute to Hollywood - a crowd outside a theatre in the manner of Singin' in the Rain watching a trio of vast women, the Belleville Triplets, explode from limousines too small to contain them, followed by a show in which they perform to pastiche 1930s jazz. Joining them on the stage are Josephine Baker doing her celebrated topless shimmy-shake (the one played continuously in the V and A's Art Deco exhibition) and Fred Astaire tap dancing until his shoes take on a life of their own. The uppers separate from the soles, the nails become ferocious teeth and they consume Fred like a crocodile destroying its prey. This is in grainy, tinted monochrome and we discover it's an old film being viewed on TV by a blue-collar French family 50 years ago.

The matriarch of this rickety four-storey house leaning back from a railway viaduct is Madame Souza, a cripple with a built-up shoe (which she later turns to magnificent advantage) and an overweight grandson. Discovering beneath his bed a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about cycling, she realises their conjoined vocations - he is destined to become a cyclist and she will be his trainer, turning him into a champion, all muscle, sinew and skin. Their training sessions are a graphic wonder as she drives him up colline and down vallée, toning his body with a lawn-mower and a vacuum cleaner. Meanwhile, the devoted family dog, Bruno, as dreamy and dedicated as Charlie Brown's beagle, barks at the trains passing outside his widow and imagines himself driving a locomotive that resembles Stephenson's Rocket.

Eventually Champion is ready for the Tour de France. The time is the 1960s, De Gaulle is preaching national gloire on TV and Madame Souza puts her grandson into the race, with herself, Bruno and a sturdy truck driver as his support. They plough on south and Champion gets among the leaders. Then a sinister gang of Mafiosi, resembling three-dimensional playing cards, intervene. They kidnap Champion and two other riders, whisking them off to foreign parts on a freight ship from an acutely observed Marseille. The intrepid Madame Souza, more than a little assisted by Bruno, pursues them across the Atlantic in a fragile craft and the climax is played out in the utopian/dystopian Belleville, a devastatingly disdainful view of New York where the Statue of Liberty is obese and most of the citizens are overweight. As the city's language is French one infers this is a joke at the expense of De Gaulle's beloved Quebec.

There she and Bruno join forces with theTriplettes, now thin as a result of a diet of live frogs, to take on the Mafia and its drunken Godfather, who are using Champion and the two other cyclists for nefarious purposes. The movie is funny, fast moving and ruthless. The extraordinary leaps have an immediate logic that joins one scene to the next with links of steel, Chomet's immediate European debts are to Tintin and the non-verbal comedy of Jacques Tati - a clip from Jour de Fête features in the movie and he is its dedicatee. Delicatessen could be another influence.

From the English-speaking world we might also find comparisons with Nick Park's films featuring Wallace and Gromit, the drawings of Gerald Hoffnung and the beguiling New Yorker cartoons by George Booth about eccentric lower-class Americans living in happy squalor with weird cats and dogs. Exhilarating stuff.

Impossible to describe, impossible to forget, Les Triplettes de Belleville sends audiences tottering out of the theater, dazed and delighted, and wondering what it is they have just experienced.
Full of contradictions, Triplettes is both an animation and a feature film, both adult and childish. At times, it resembles a cross between the golden glow of an old-fashioned Christmas card and one of those eccentric George Booth New Yorker cartoons. Although it is a French film, there are no subtitles - no dialogue at all really, just murmurs, mutters and the toot of a referee's whistle.

Just don't attempt to explain the plot to friends. There's really no good way to lay it out without sounding as if you have lost your moviegoing mind.

I don't know what writer-director Sylvain Chomet has got, but no one is going to steal it from him. You've never seen anything like this. Sustaining the tone to feature-film length makes this a delicate, offbeat treasure.

Now, there are a few quibbles. Between the entrancing beginning and the slam-bang ending is a leisurely middle that could have been tightened. The curious, tuneless ditty that the triplettes keep singing is meant to be a toe- tapper, but after a while it feels more like someone rapping endlessly on your cranium. But those are minor blips in a unique and fascinating piece of work. Just the scene of the grandmother at the start, giving the boy a puppy and then hiding behind the door to see if he likes it, is touching, honest and real. And it is a bold choice to make the young bicyclist aloof even from us. He is utterly self-absorbed and never unbends to offer thanks for his grandmother's aid or even to acknowledge their attempt to escape. He only rides his bike, lost in the effort.

Chomet cites his influences as 101 Dalmatians, The Aristocats, The Jungle Book and "the golden age of the Disney studio,'' which are surprisingly retro references. After all, this is a time when Finding Nemo seems to have convinced everyone that the future is in computer-generated graphics.

A work like Chomet's restores the potential of hand-drawn animation. It is a reminder that it isn't that the technique is outdated but that we are tired of the safe, predictable formula. Chomet is off in a new direction altogether. When, for example, a Fred Astaire character steps on the stage for a dance, we think we know where this is headed. But instead, his shoes slip off his feet, sprout nails for teeth and devour Fred up to the waist. We are surprised, amused and a little unsettled. Those feelings persist for the rest of the film - and for days afterward.

Ce qu'il y a de bien dans le cinéma d'animation français en particulier, et européen, en général, c'est son originalité. Difficile de définir un style particulier, un trait à la française, une french touch. Chaque film se nourrit de ses propres inspirations, sans suivre une certaine tradition, comme on peut le voir dans les cinémas d'animation à l'américaine ou à la japonaise. On se souvient de la récente adaptation de Corto Maltese, où les mouvements des personnages donnaient l'impression de vivre un rêve éveillé en compagnie d'aventuriers intemporels. On se souvient de Kirikou et la sorcière, où derrière un trait apparemment simple, se cachaient des trésors d'émotions. Avec Les Triplettes de Belleville, premier long métrage de Sylvain Chomet, remarqué précédemment avec un court, la Vieille dame et les pigeons, la surprise est au rendez-vous. De l'action, de l'humour, de la poésie. Et une incroyable maîtrise technique. Réjouissant.

Les Triplettes portent en elles les cinq années de labeur écoulées depuis le début du projet. La patience et le soin apporté aux détails se retrouvent à l'écran, dans l'architecture des décors, dans les intérieurs, dans la richesse des couleurs et dans la subtilité des éclairages. Mais les Triplettes, ce sont avant tout une histoire et des personnages. Madame Souza, grand-mère gentille et dévouée, entraîne son petit-neveu passionné de cyclisme. Pendant le Tour de France, des malfrats enlèvent le coureur. La vieille dame, aidée de son chien Bruno, se lance à la poursuite des ravisseurs qui la mènent de l'autre côté de l'océan, où elle va rencontrer les Triplettes, anciennes stars du music-hall. Déroutante histoire.

Pendant la première partie du film, le spectateur assiste au quotidien de la vieille dame au regard si chaleureux et de son petit-neveu taciturne et mélancolique. Les années passent, ils s'entraînent, alors qu'à l'extérieur la ville change : les voix ferrées, les ponts, les immeubles, la modernité, envahissent le paysage. Jusque sous leur fenêtre. On pense à l'univers de Delicatessen, de Caro et Jeunet : une époque qu'on pourrait situer dans les années 50, mais qui relève plus de l'anachronisme onirique. Où donc se trouve cette mairie du XXIe arrondissement de ce qu'on suppose être Paris ? Dans la salle à manger, les ustensiles et autres détails fourmillent : un gramophone, un réchaud, des coupes, des bouteilles, de vieux meubles bons pour la brocante… Le travail de Evgeni Tomov sur les décors confère à cette première partie l'atmosphère nostalgique d'une époque surannée. On pense au titre, à Belleville, lorsque ce faubourg existait en dehors des murs de Paris, lorsqu'on s'y croyait à la campagne, lorsque du haut de ses collines on apercevait au loin la Tour Eiffel. Mais ce petit coin perdu à la lisière de la capitale n'est pas le Belleville auquel on pense, puisque le Belleville du titre désigne une mégalopole où échouent les héros, sorte de mélange architectural entre New-York et Montréal. En traversant les eaux, le film nous embarque dans une seconde partie qui laisse la part belle aux péripéties et à l'action, dans un monde étrange plus cauchemardesque qu'onirique. Les autochtones souffrent tous d'obésité, les Triplettes se nourrissent exclusivement de grenouilles, et la mafia locale a pour devise " in vino veritas ", roule en 2CV et porte le béret… Chomet bâtit son monde sur un mélange de clichés.

Techniquement, les Triplettes offrent un spectacle de toute beauté. L'apport de la technologie 3D, toujours discrète, sert seulement à soutenir les techniques de dessin traditionnel. Ce qui donne l'occasion, par exemple, d'assister à une impressionnante tempête en haute mer. Les animateurs ont apporté un soin particulier aux mouvements des personnages. Le film se passe de dialogues. Tout réside dans le jeu des protagonistes, inspiré du mime et des grands comiques du muet, comme Buster Keaton, ou encore du spectacle de percussions Stomp. Les perspectives distordues, notamment celles de Belleville et du port, avec ces navires immenses, participent de l'atmosphère quelque peu fantastique du film. Mais ce qu'on retient avant tout des Triplettes, c'est la tendresse entre une vieille dame et son petit-fils. Passés le rire, l'action, et les délires géo-historiques, demeure l'amour, qui se rappelle à chacun à la toute fin du film. Nostalgie, quand tu nous tiens.

Awards for Les Triplettes de Belleville

Best Animated Film: Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, 2004
New York Film Critics Circle Awards 2003
San Diego Film Critics Society Awards 2003
Seattle Film Critics Awards 2003
Best Foreign Language Film: Boston Society of Film Critics Awards 2003
BAFTA-nominated 2004
BIFA-nominated 2003
Jury Special Prize: Copenhagen International Film Festival 2003