During the Tour, Champion and two other cyclists are kidnapped by members of the French Mafia and taken to the city of Belleville, a place that looks like New York, Montréal and Paris combined, where they will be made to cycle until they collapse, with members of the Mafia taking bets on who will be the only survivor. Madame Souza is rigorously training her grandson, Champion, for the Tour de France. The story is a relatively lightweight affair, and is strictly there to support the artwork and gags rather than the other way round. The results are, quite frankly, astounding. Widely marketed as a French film, this French-Belgian-Canadian co-production with partial UK funding was largely animated in a cramped office in Montréal with a skeleton crew working with outdated technology and very little room for error. His previous claim to fame is La Vieille Dame et les Pigeons, a short piece of animation that displays, albeit in a more simplistic form, many of Belleville’s hallmarks.

Until I saw Les Triplettes de Belleville (released as Belleville Rendez-vous in the UK and The Triplets of Belleville in the US), I had never heard of director Sylvain Chomet.

Wackiness ensues as Michael Mackenzie reviews the French collector’s edition release of Les Triplettes de Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s crazy animated masterpiece (known in the UK as Belleville Rendez-vous).

Les triplettes de belleville torrent