Episode 7 - The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003)
The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
In Episode 7, Chris and Alex encounter ferocious bicycle wheels, music hall stars fishing for frogs using dynamite, and the French mafia in their discussion of the frankly bizarre animated fantasy The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003). With minimal dialogue and an expressionist, borderline surreal visual style, Chomet’s film - released in the UK as Belleville Rendezvous - is erratic, eccentric, and downright charming. It offers spectators a journey through early-1900’s France via some ornate painterly backdrops, and an army of grotesque characters (in the mould of cartoonist Gerard Scarfe) that populate this pedal-powered modern metropolis.
Suggested Readings
Attebery, Brian. 1992. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1983. A Rhetoric of the Unreal Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, Karl F. 1997. Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Neupert, Richard. 2011. French Animation History. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Wells, Paul. 2002. Animation: Genre and Authorship. London: Wallflower Press.