Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Triplets of Belleville
2003 · Sylvain Chomet · The Triplets of Belleville on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how each character's body looks purpose-built for one thing. (setting)
Champion's cyclist legs, Souza's built-up shoe, the mafia's identical black rectangles: nobody explains a background, the drawing tells you everything about how each person lives.
Payoff: The film uses caricature to show what each character's life has done to their body. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls a posture that exposes a whole way of living a gest, legible without a word of dialogue.
Listen for how little spoken dialogue the film actually uses. (sound)
Barking, bicycle wheels, and household objects carry most of the storytelling, with only a few muttered lines of speech across the whole runtime.
Payoff: Sound and gesture do the work that dialogue usually does in almost every other film.
Notice the color change between the countryside and Belleville. (light)
Warm, faded sepia-browns mark Souza's European past, while sickly, congested tones take over once the story moves to the swollen American city.
Payoff: The color itself carries the film's mood rather than just describing where you are.
Notice how enormous and uniform Belleville's citizens all look. (staging)
Chomet draws the harbor crowd as identically obese figures, a satirical exaggeration of consumer excess that turns a whole population into a single caricatured mass.
Payoff: The city reads as one bloated organism rather than a collection of individuals.
Watch Bruno the dog react to the passing train. (performance)
The anxious, overweight dog barks rhythmically at the train every time it passes, a piece of behavior built entirely from movement and timing rather than words.
Payoff: His habit tells you who he is more clearly than any line of dialogue could.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch each body, not the plot. Chomet draws what a life has done to a person, not what happens next.