Jean-claude Donda

The Triplets of Belleville, one of 2003's more prominent animated features, isn't on a lot of our lists. Here's why. Triplets has a memorable visual style that words have a hard time capturing, but it's not a great movie because there's no compelling narrative or anything else to support the artistic flourishes. Style shouldn't take a backseat to story in any medium, and that includes animation. Just ask fans of The Simpsons and comic books.

Continue reading: The Triplets Of Belleville Review

A beautifully and brilliantly bizarre, near-silent cartoon from France, "The Triplets of Belleville" is a surreal wonder revolving around a back-of-the-pack Tour de France biker who is kidnapped by a midget mafioso's morphed-together henchmen to be part of a weird criminal carnival attraction.

The curiously beguiling concoction of innovative comic book artist Sylvain Chomet, it's a film that pays wiggly stylistic homage to Betty Boop and other early cartoons while creating an idiosyncratic and darkly whimsical world all its own in which an ocean-crossing rescue attempt is mounted by the biker's diminutive, gimpy, mustachioed grandmother, with the help of his spindly-legged, overweight childhood dog and a trio of aged Vaudeville singers.

Chomet's charming, visually cluttered realm of exaggerated bodies and elongated buildings is so imaginative and vividly realized that you could freeze any frame and spend an hour picking through its details, and his story is so unconventional as to be wholly unpredictable -- even to a seasoned, cynical movie critic. I apologize for the thesarus-bomb of 50-cent adjectives, but I'm at a loss for more evocative words. I've never seen anything like it before and I can't wait to see it again.

A beautifully and brilliantly bizarre, near-silent cartoon from France, "The Triplets of Belleville" is a surreal wonder revolving around a back-of-the-pack Tour de France biker who is kidnapped by a midget mafioso's morphed-together henchmen to be part of a weird criminal carnival attraction.

The curiously beguiling concoction of innovative comic book artist Sylvain Chomet, it's a film that pays wiggly stylistic homage to Betty Boop and other early cartoons while creating an idiosyncratic and darkly whimsical world all its own in which an ocean-crossing rescue attempt is mounted by the biker's diminutive, gimpy, mustachioed grandmother, with the help of his spindly-legged, overweight childhood dog and a trio of aged Vaudeville singers.

Chomet's charming, visually cluttered realm of exaggerated bodies and elongated buildings is so imaginative and vividly realized that you could freeze any frame and spend an hour picking through its details, and his story is so unconventional as to be wholly unpredictable -- even to a seasoned, cynical movie critic. I apologize for the thesarus-bomb of 50-cent adjectives, but I'm at a loss for more evocative words. I've never seen anything like it before and I can't wait to see it again.