When you hear "animated movie," what do you imagine?
Aladdin and Jasmine falling in love, the fairy godmother helping Cinderella to the ball, and Lady and the Tramp eating spaghetti together? Yeah, me too.
But times are definitely changing. Disney isn't dominating the market anymore; it's being trumped by Pixar and original foreign cartoons, like "The Triplets of Belleville."
The characters are no longer beautiful women with perfect bodies and long hair. Instead, writer and director Sylvain Chomet decided strangely distorted figures would be better for his film, which was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film for this year's Oscars.
In this mostly silent movie, the witty, eccentric and dark humor comes from characters' actions. The film is a combination of surreal two-dimensional and computer animation. It is imaginative, inventive and so bizarre you can't take your eyes off the screen. Between the immensely fat women in Belleville to the musical styles of a vacuum cleaner, refrigerator and a newspaper, Chomet didn't miss a beat.
The story begins with a kid, his grandma and a dog. Time goes by and the kid grows up to be a cyclist. He has a skinny, long upper body, a tremendous nose and enormously disgusting legs.
The dog gets incredibly fat and barks at a train (which comes by 80 times throughout the movie) due to fear from some tail and train accident he had when he was a puppy.
The grandmother, the kid's trainer, wears one really high shoe and one flat shoe and carries a whistle in her mouth to get her grandson to ride faster.
During the Tour de France, the mafia captures the grandson and two other cyclists. Although we aren't initially sure why, all is explained by the end.
The grandmother sets out to find him with the help of the dog's sense of smell. On her way, she meets the Triplets of Belleville, a singing group that used to be made up of three beautiful women, but now, they are freakishly tall, haggish sirens.
At this point, the movie gets even stranger with the help of a suspenseful and, of course, strange car chasing action scene.
No matter what type of movie you prefer, this one will just make you laugh. The triplet grandmas eat frogs on Popsicle sticks, the mafia guys have square backs that hunch about 5 feet over their heads, the kid has no facial expressions throughout the movie, and the dog has weird dreams about being on the train and all the people barking at him.
It's hard to describe the brilliance of this film. It has to be seen.