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The Triplets of Belleville

The Triplets of Belleville

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It's Own Animated Movie
Review: "Triplets of Belleville" ("Belleville Rendez-Vous") is a highly unique modern-day animated film. It garnered two 2003 Oscar nominations: Best Animated Film and Best Original Song. This French film shows how to keep audiences entertained for eighty minutes without hearing much dialogue. The only dialogue heard is from the radio, the music, and the television. This has not often been mastered so delightfully since the days of silent movies in the 1920's. Its chain of events remain interesting throughout: the dog always barking at the train to the bike race to the kidnapping to the grandmother's rescue quest to her meeting with the Belleville triplets. The characters' facial expressions and the sound effects alone tell the story wonderfully. The different versions of the song of the same french name gives this film the added viewing pleasure. Many viewers may have this song stuck in their heads for a while due to the catchiness. The animations were drawn wonderfully, offering unique visions of the physical surroundings and the characters. The details and the use of color digs deeper into the artists' creative minds. Such overall film quality makes "Triplets of Belleville" sure to please audiences. This unique film will be remembered for a long time.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Delightful, Madcap Animated Masterpiece!
Review: French director Sylvain Chomet's "The Triplets Of Belleville" is simply delicious! Delightful! It is a creatively comic, animated, artistic, madcap, magical delight of a film! And I do not exaggerate!

A widowed grandmother, Madame Souza, lives with her beloved orphaned grandson, Champion and their fat hound Bruno, (one of the film's best characters). All three train hard to fulfill Champion's dream - to win the Tour de France. When the boy is kidnapped by organized crimsters during the race, Bruno and Grandma follow him across the ocean, in a rented paddle boat, to the metropolis of Bellville - an island which could resemble Manhattan crossed with Quebec City, and has a curiously obese Statue of Liberty in its harbor. They are rescued from homelessness and hunger by an elderly trio of divine divas, the Triplets of Belleville. The triplets were once jazz age singing stars and are now reduced to making their living through inventive sound. The eccentric group of five sets out to find Champion, with some stops along the way to play some great percussion.

This is not a traditional animated film. It's certainly not Walt Disney, although I like Disney Productions. There is nothing cute or sentimental here. What's here is weird. There is little dialogue but lots of sound and satire. Squeaks, horns, barks, gibberish in French, English and Portuguese, and the wonderful music of Benoit Charest make up the soundtrack. The story is told so well visually that there is no need for language. The animated cartoons are fabulously original and are hand-drawn, not computer generated...and they're oh, so French!

I'd better end here, I've run out of superlatives. Treat yourself. See "Triplets."
JANA

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The best sort of lighthearted animated entertainment
Review: This French animation feature is less than 90 minutes long but it's pure hoot. Madame Souza looks after her Tour-de-France-cyclist grandson -- whose name is "Champion" -- and when he's kidnapped during the race by large, square-shouldered villains, she follows them across the ocean to the city of Belleville . . . which looks suspiciously like a French-eye view of New York, complete with grotesquely overweight natives and oversized automobiles. There she meets the triplets, an aging trio of hot jazz singers from the 1920s or '30s, now living in a tenement and subsisting on frogs (harvested with potato-masher grenades). And the rescue of Champion is on the way! The real star, though, may be the loyal dog, Bruno, who takes seriously his job of barking at passing trains, and who dreams of them in black & white. The artwork is terrific (especially the use of facial expressions, which tell all), the plot is droll, and the theme music will stick in your head for days. And don't forget to look for Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire in the opening sequence (not to mention the Einsteinian reference), and the cheeseburger-brandishing Statue of Liberty later on. Also, there's almost no dialogue so you needn't worry about reading subtitles.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Boring, Really Boring
Review: I must have seen a different movie than most of the other reviewers did. This one started off bad, like one of those annoying 1930s cartoons with annoying music and crude one-note characters, and then got worse and worse. The plot, conveyed entirely without dialogue, concerns a morose French boy who does nothing but train for bicycle races. He is eventually kidnapped by American gangsters. Boy's grandmother comes to America to try to rescue him, encounters lots of nasty, stupid, and incredibly obese Americans. Boy dies. The end. Along the way, the same obvious, feeble visual jokes are repeated dozens of times. They aren't funny the first time and get more and more annoying each time they are repeated. Maybe in different hands this would have made a compelling animated film, but I'm sorry to have to say that Triplets is one of the most boring and irritating movies I've ever seen. It fails as entertainment, it fails as social commentary, it fails as a work of art. Film critics made a lot of ballyhoo about the handmade animation, but it just looks like an old Mister Magoo cartoon. As harsh and mean as some of the other one-star Amazon reviews are, they have accurately described the experience of trying to watch this very disappointing and overhyped movie.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It's a rendez-vous you sure can't miss!
Review: An elder lady by the name of Madame Souza teams up with a trio of Astaire-era lady singers to rescue her cyclist grandson from being kidnapped.

That's all there is to the plot here...

Otherwise, it's a relaxing break for the grown-ups who have been fed up with what the animation industry's commercial American fare has had to offer in the past few years now. It's produced in Canada, France, Belgium and Britain, so it's automatically better off than anything else hand-drawn, and even up there with Pixar and PDI. The animation, though ugly for some, is of a style not seen since the Disney feature fare of the 60's up till the late 80's. This is the art of the industry at work--courtesy of the film's director, Sylvain Chomet.

See it on STARZ! while you can--you, an animation lover, won't get too disappointed. *****/5 stars

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Brilliant Social Criticism
Review: Triplets contains the most subtle yet daring criticism ever made about greedy, heartless, soulless America: AMERICANS ARE FAT! Triplets is also deceptively dull: Only crude stupid fat Americans would mistake its relentless, unvarying repetition of a few simplistic tropes for something "grindingly tedious". These are probably the same people who find the music of Philip Glass "boring"! It is so obvious to those of us who love this movie that those who don't are just stupid reactionary racist jingoes who marry their cousins and live on potato chips, hot dogs, and jugs of Diet Pepsi. I'm so glad I'm not one of those people.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A wonderful new "Adult" cartoon movie.
Review: By "Adult" movie I mean alot of the jokes kids wouldn't understand. By all means, show this to your child! Kids these days aren't exposed to different idea's anymore. Everything is "sugar coated" for todays youth. Moving along. The main thing I liked about this movie the most was how they poked fun at the way Americans look. They made them look fat and dumpy, pretty much how ALOT of people in America are shaped these days. How many times do you see some huge, tub o' lard, woman waiting in line at the local McDonalds? ALL THE FREAKIN' TIME! Lets face it people, we're dumpy people! A harmless social comment that alot of people on this website (mainly, closed minded, America loving Republicans) didn't seem to like. I'm not going to "sugar coat" anything, the fat dumpy Americans in this movie ARE the best part! (Just so you know, I myself am a fat guy and I thought it was funny! People need to stop taking things so seriously!) The next best thing about this movie was the artwork. It's creepy, it's dark and it's "ugly." However, not in a bad way. It's just the style the artist decided to use. Give this movie a shot, it's interesting to watch. It's one of a kind! Not like the normal CRAP on TV these days!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Funny Dog Bark at Fat Murkans HA!
Review: Don't believe the negative reviews. The character development in this movie is GREAT! My favorite is the dog who barks at trains, and then also barks at trains. Later on in the movie, the dog is also shown barking at trains. The bicyclist likes to ride his bicycle. He also trains for bicycle races. Later on, he races his bicycle. He is very serious and lives only to race his bicycle. His dog barks at trains. Murkans are fat and shoot guns. They also eat cheeseburgers and shoot guns. Later on, they are seen eating cheeseburgers and shooting guns. But not all Murkans: some of them also shoot guns and eat cheeseburgers. And they are fat. The funniest scenes show Murkans trying to squeeze their fat buttocks into their big cars. Boy, those Murkans are fat! And the dog barks at trains. With character development like that, who the hell needs dialogue? Don't be a fat, close-minded Murkan by disliking this movie. Prove you aren't a fat, close-minded Murkan by liking this movie. Or at least say that you like this movie so people won't think you are a fat, close-minded Murkan.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Highly Original! Very Imaginative!!!
Review: The movie is generally about a cyclist who is kidnapped by these strange box looking characters from a bicycle race. His grandmother and dog start an adventure looking for him, who meets unusual characters. This movie is not for every one!! The first time I watched the movie I fell asleep. Not because I was bored but there is virtually no dialogue and it is similar to Fantasia, where the movie is mostly visual and musically appealing with 20s-40s era gypsy jazz and other interesting scores. Character development is unbelievably good considering the lack of script. Expressions in the animation says it all. The dog was my favorite character, barking at every train that goes by and having surreal dreams. Not for every one, if you have an open mind and appreciate animation, you must see this movie.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: We Get It.
Review: Note to pretentious snobs: It's entirely possible to "get" all the references in a movie, to grasp the director's point, and still not like it, still remain unimpressed. Cut the patronizing crap already.


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