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The Triplets of Belleville

The Triplets of Belleville

List Price: $24.96
Your Price: $18.72
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Perfection!
Review: From the first scene with jazzy singing a la Josephine Baker and guitar style of Django Reinhart I was totally smitten with this film. It is an absolute work of genius. The story is oddly touching (tho a bit creepy in spots!), with train obsessed dogs, bike obsessed men, and utterly self sacrificing grandmothers. And les triplettes were just marvelous. My only problem with this movie is that now I cannot stop singing and toe tapping the Belleville Rendez-vous!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I guess I am the only one who hated this movie.
Review: I love animation in all it glory, but this is a horrible movie. It was anti-American, it was disgusting and I found myself sitting through the whole movie waiting for it to start and get the plot going. When it was over, I was left wondering what happen here. I went with my mother and my gramma and my 16 year old brother. We all love movies and many different kinds of movies. We are the ones who go to the sleeper hits first, we are the ones who go see the independent films,so, we consider ourselves educated movie goers. We all hated this movie. We all looked at each other through out the movie wondering if this was supposed to be funny and entertaining? The only thing about this movie that we enjoyed was the song, because it is very catchy. I do not recomend this movie to anyone, especially the general American public. It is boring and disgusting and waste of time.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: *insert title here*
Review: conversation with one of my friends when going to see this in the theater:

"does this movie have subtitles?"
"no, it doesn't need them"
"but it's a foreign film. how are we going to know what they're saying?"
"they don't really talk much"

best description of the dialogue aspect right there. but the music makes up for it and somehow the plot makes more sense without dialogue that a lot of movies do with it.

i'm knocking the dvd down a star because the dali cartoon in the beginning of the theatrical release isn't on it. but it still makes me happy.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Odd
Review: First of all, the animation is brilliant. If it wasn't for the incredibly unique and beautiful artwork, there would be absolutely NO reason whatsoever to see this movie. The animation is so good, it is capable of carrying virtually no story line or character development. It revolves around this grandmother searching for her kidnapped grandson. She meets the triplets who appear out of nowhere and they risk their lives to help her. Why? Who knows. The chase scene is cleaver but not well thought out. The bad guys are beyond stupid. They couldn't shoot anybody with those gun of theirs if the person was as big as a house. And their cars are only capable of going 3mph. This movie could have been brilliant if it only had a solid story. There was no real thought or emotion put into it. All the concentration is in the animation. This is no where near as good as Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away on any accounts. That's a movie that is perfect in every way possible.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I saw the movie in the theater, and had to purchase!!!!!
Review: My husband and I went to see this movie in the theater in February on a whim after reading a review by Roger Ebert. He said that he loved the movie, but wasn't sure why. It is a very amazing use of digital animation which has a wonderful heart and soul to it, unlike most modern animation. I do have to say that this is my absolute favorite movie in a very long time. We both thought that we saw some very sly digs at a certain studio (think mouse), and were able to confirm our impressions when we purchased the DVD. The scenes I am referring to were the ones with bathroom in the triplets building (the shape of the item in the toilet), and the man adjusting the machine looked familiar. I know we will be sharing this exceptional movie with friends and family, and watching it many more times.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Beautiful animation with modern meaning
Review: Even though this film seems to take place before 1950, it is about the world situation today. It is a distinctly French view of America. For some reason, the people I watched it with and the people on this board seem to think the men in suits are the "French Mafia." This is wrong. Those men are rich CEO's. I mean think about it. These men in suits get foreigners to run a machine and then they bet on it (a symbol referring to the stock market- or capitalism in general). This film is about AMERICA and the detrimental effects its system has on other countries. If you're American and can't take criticism of this country then don't see this film, as you will look like an idiot when you're ranting about it. Otherwise it's an extremely brutal (and honest and beautiful and true) look at what American companies are doing to the world.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Les Triplettes de Belleville est fantastique!
Review: The challenge for the makers of this quite remarkable animated feature, apparently, was to be able to tell a story entirely through the subtle visual cues created by the animator's hand. Achieving that effect is no mean feat. Caricature, a species of visual comedy, is one way to communicate with the audience. The creators of this film exploit this technique very deftly and effectively throughout for the broadly drawn characters. However, other more subtle techniques were used to explore more deeply the principal characters.

A great deal of attention is given to the pet dog, Bruno, who by the end of the film becomes well understood and sympathetic, purely through the animators technique, being utterly speechless tho not by any means noiseless, by nature. Champion, the driven cyclist is effectively kept remote throughout. We learn a lot about Madame Souzi, the protagonist, through her eyes which are very curiously animated and suggestive of her thoughts at any given moment she's on screen. Each moment of realization or epiphany for her is marked by a tap to her glasses accompanied by an audible >click< of her frames. Very effective.

The story is punctuated and rhythmically driven by a great deal of very fine jazz music, including musical set pieces using all manner of unlikely instruments. The merging of bicycle wheel tuning with a revived nightclub act involving household appliances is a positively sublime moment.

There is much social satire, with apparent jabs even at the celebrated Tour de France: the athletes with their overdeveloped muscles laboring up profoundly steep climbs while wine swilling, overeating spectators and all manner of smoky, fuming motorcades close in around them, adding up to a hidiously gaudy spectacle. The portrayal of the cyclists is unmistakeably that of well-trained thoroughbreds utterly devoid of any descernible aim in life other than to reach the finish line first on their bikes. The gambling horseracing metaphor is further explored from the standpoint of the mafiosi, but is not without comment on the legitimate contest. Taken as a whole, a quite unflattering portrait of the bicycle racing biz.

There are so many great visual jokes in the film, it would be a travesty to single out any one of them as the best, but the car chase send-up at the dramatic conclusion of the film is quite noteworthy for it's interesting uses of gravity. Great fun!

Overall, Les Triplettes de Belleville is a fantastic visual and auditory feast that will hold up quite well under repeated viewings and hearings, I'm sure.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: BEST ANNIMATED MOVIE IN YEARS
Review: I absolutly love this movie.I origionaly thought it would be stupid I hadn't herd of it before but was forced into going to the theater to see it I was amazed the annimation is incredile the story is clever and funny as hell and I bairly noticed through the whole movie that there was no talking its just incredible it sould have won more accadamy awards I belive it won 1 for best song but Finding Nemo was funny but this was outragiouse get ASAP you won't be sorry

And one more thing that whole thing with the annaimators just trying to make fun of Americans come on that (...) its not ever funny what they did was clever and funny and anybody who can't see it as just ignorant and close minded

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Too weird to enjoy
Review: Ok, maybe I'm not the most sophisticated movie-goer, but I did not enjoy this movie. I had heard that it was fantastic, and I had high expectations, but I was very disappointed. I wouldn't recommend it to a friend unless they were the type who say they like strange things just to prove how unique they are.

The grandmother and the dog were appealing and interesting characters, but the rest of them were incomprehensible. The music was annoying, as were the garbly French voices. The plot was simple, yet it didn't make any sense - even in a cartoon land - especially the chase scene at the end.

If you go to see it, just be prepared for an odd, unusual movie - in all respects. If that's your bag, you just might like it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Intriguing, but almost too strange for its own good...
Review: Ever been in one of those situations where you're right in the middle of a conversation...that doesn't involve you, and there's an in-joke that's really funny...and you have NO CLUE what the hell is going on? Welcome to Sylvain Chomet's maddening, head-scratchingly bizarre Triplets of Belleville, folks. And for the next 80 minutes, you'll be treated to some of the most subversively weird, compellingly odd images in the history of movies. An in-joke, I suppose, that I wish I had gotten...but almost didn't. Because the thing is: in this virtually wordless, somewhat plotless (I won't even bother to summarize the plot because you'll swear I'm on crack) fever-dream of a movie is something special. And as much as I'd like to say that this is another weirdo French movie that adds to our stereotype of them as Tour de France-loving, smelly fatsos, I was oddly fascinated by the movie. Like passing automobile carnage on the side of the road and gawking like a 12-year-old boy in a girl's shower room. For one, the film's animation (some twisted love-child of anime, Disney, and Dali) is eye-blinkingly fascinating. A deux, the score evokes a sleazy 30's film noir at moments, and then some kind of beer-soaked, phantasmagoric vaudeville at others. And then the characters - an old Grandma with the strength of ten, French mafia men (hehe - no, I'm not joking) with boxy shoulders and views to kill, and a train-obsessed dog who stays up all night barking at trains. Jeeze, I can't believe I actually wrote a paragraph about this movie, because the state of mind evoked by this strange, flawed import is simply like nothing else I've seen. And I guess that's an achievement right there. Though I can't say I enjoyed every moment of Belleville, I was intrigued by it enough to stick with it. And a final note: I'm not much into the mind-controlling psychotropic substances myself, but if you happen to be, grab some and check out Belleville. What a trip that would be. GRADE: B-


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