Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Troy (A) on December 26, 2003 at 17:56:16

Saw this today. What a wonderfully weird little animated movie.

Told without dialogue, the story is truly bizarre and a pure screwball fantasy about kidnapped Tour de France cyclists and grandma and Bruno the dog's resuce attemps in the big fat American city of Belleville populated by big fat Americans. The Triplets are a musical sister act with a fixation for frogcicles and musical refrigerators. Being a French movie, no French cliche and and stereotype is left unturned. The plot simply defies description . . . in a good way.

Utterly unlike anything this animation freak has ever seen (sort of a cross between jazz-age disney shorts and Jeunet's "City of losdt children combined with the Pink Panther cartoons), the film is a tour de force of hand-drawn cell-animation style and technique. Too obscure to win an oscar for best animated film against the Disney/Pixar juggernaut of "Finding Nemo", but this surreal little flick deserves an audience.