In their wisdom the anointed few who vote for the Academy Awards chose to honor FINDING NEMO (click to see VANCE'S REVIEW OF NEMO) over its antithesis, an adult animated movie that eschews Disney cuteness, a movie that is warped, perverse, disgusting, dark, disturbing, dreamlike, melancholy, and heroic, at once both a satire of gluttonous consumerism and a class-warfare fable in which four impoverished old women (our heroines) prevail (for once) over the rich and powerful.

Unfortunately, most of the wit, allusions, and cultural references in THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE are less meaningful for the young than they are for geezers such as your modest reviewer. At different points in the story, the animators emulate the style of the early-1930's black-and-white Silly Symphony cartoons, the mid-1960's Pink Panther cartoons, and Edward Gorey's woodcuts, and the celebrities we see include Django Reinhardt, Fred Astaire, Josephine Baker, and Charles DeGaulle.

But young and old alike will enjoy the movie's sick-joke humor. Consider, for example, the depiction of the human body in TRIPLETS. You won't see Cinderella or the Little Mermaid in the megalopolis of Belleville, no handsome princes either. Every character has a physique that's deformed or distorted. Impossibly obese pedestrians waddle up and down the sidewalks with a rolling, ponderous, blubbery gait, their mouths stuffed with fries, their eyes glazed. The professional bicyclists are cadaverous famine victims from the waist up, but they have huge grasshopper legs with quadriceps and calves that bulge like tumors. Then there are the gnomish rich men with their wine-swollen raspberry noses, the rich men's hulking robotic bodyguards with their squared-off shoulders and sunken heads, the clubfooted grandmother Madame Souza, her painfully bloated dog Bruno, and the triplets themselves, once-sexy gypsy-style cabaret singers who have declined over the decades into gaunt, wrinkled, saggy-breasted crones who shuffle around in their raggedy nightgowns like the three witches in Macbeth.

Or consider the movie's depiction of our eating habits. The porcine populace of Belleville consumes vast quantities of soda pop and greasy burgers while the gnomish little rich men pickle their brains in fine wine. By contrast, do our heroines eat wholesome peasant food? Not at all. Madame Souza prepares heaping mounds of some unidentifiable grayish-green mucilaginous slop that's laced through and through with the heads and skeletons of tiny fish. The triplets prefer to dine on frogs they catch by tossing explosives into the lake of stagnant industrial waste behind their slum tenement building.

There is a richness of ideas in TRIPLETS, but nearly all of them are suggested or implied rather than stated directly, so it's reasonable to expect that critics and audiences will have some widely differing opinions of what the movie's about. For my money, the movie's most important idea, its central theme, is that the only resources available to people who are oppressed and downtrodden, the only powers of the powerless, are endurance and ingenuity. 

Madame Souza and her grandson Champion show unflagging endurance even though their lives are sad and empty. When Champion is bicycling uphill, his head hangs, his eyes close, his shoulders sag, his torso wavers from side to side, but he refuses to quit. Madame Souza and Bruno stubbornly propel a pedal-boat across an entire ocean in their attempt to rescue Champion from kidnappers. And the triplets persist in their devotion to music and mischief even though age and poverty have turned them into hags.

The ingenuity of the powerless is equally evident. At one point, Madame Souza gets a truck going again by using Bruno for a tire. The triplets have no instruments, so they make music with a refrigerator rack, a beat-up old vacuum cleaner, and a newspaper. Madame Souza joins them by tapping with sticks on the spokes of a bicycle wheel. And during the movie's climactic chase scene, all four of our old ladies demonstrate brilliant ingenuity in the tricks they employ to elude and foil their pursuers.

In closing, let me give you a warning. The triplets' theme song is so infectiously rhythmic it'll stick in your head and keep playing over and over again for weeks after you've walked out of the theater. That can be a devilish distraction if you're studying for a physic's final or trying to master the Boden-Kieseritzky Gambit.

To see Teri Tom's review of this move, click HERE.