The Triplets of Belleville (2004) – 9.2

One of the most delightful films of last year, The Triplets of Belleville accomplishes what so few films do today – a lovely, disorienting sense of timelessness.  The story unfolds with increasing bizarreness: A grandmother lives in a crooked house next to an elevated train with an obese dog and her orphaned grandson, who grows up to become an Adrian-Brodyish Tour de France cyclist.  One day during a race, he is kidnapped by French mobsters and dumped into a betting ring on cyclists doped up on red wine (naturally).  The grandmother tracks them to the city, which resembles a mash-up of Paris, New York, and London, and rescues him with the help of the titular triplets, three squawky harpies who sing in a nightclub accompanied by a vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator.  Triplets exists in a dimension that, rather like Canada, seems a lot like ours, and yet not.  It’s filled with throwaway cultural references to Glenn Gould, Django Reinhardt, and 1920s Parisian nightlife, while visually resembling the macabre drawings of Edward Gorey.  Yet in feeling, it recalls Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) – both films, like the best children’s stories, are beautiful, frighteningly imaginative, and imbued with an ineffable melancholy.