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Les triplettes de Belleville [alternate title: Belleville rendez-vous; English title: The triplets of Belleville] is a work of whimsical originality, and a tour de force of feature-length animated filmmaking. Chômet's cinematic palette interweaves audiovisual and narrative inventiveness with technical bravura. Together, these elements are informed by a wide range of sociohistorical, cultural, and aesthetic influences, as various as Betty Boop, Jacques Tati, and European comic books, the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, the early animation pioneer Winsor McCay, Disney, Czech animator Karel Zeman, Terry Gilliam, Nick Park, as well as musical referents including Mozart, J. S. Bach, Django Reinhardt, the Andrews Sisters, Fred Astaire, and Josephine Baker.
Many interpretive avenues are suggested by the phantasmagorical kaleidoscope of sights, sounds, characters, and implausible events. This ambiguity is amplified by a lack of dialogue, and the medium of animation itself, which by its nature lends itself to depictions of sur- and hyperreality. Film in general, but animation in particular, is uniquely felicitous in visually representing distortions of time, the attendant effects of the aging process, and behavior or actions otherwise physically impossible. This film exaggerates and parodies conventions of masculinity and femininity: in this world, men are presented mostly as simpering, ineffectual fops, who are also either submissive and impotent, or aggressive and domineering louts. Women, conversely, are mostly idealized, larger-than-life, seemingly all-powerful and indomitable. This could be superficially understood on the level of social commentary, addressing caricatures of culture, class, ageism, gender, and Franco-American nationalism. As becomes discernible, however, these are distorted and attenuated renderings, core characteristics which have been hyperbolized, as in many dreams, in the service of a wish or some other intrapsychic motiv