The Triplets of Belleville was eccentric French Director Sylvan Chomet’s debut feature film. It was nominated for an Oscar in 2003 and is weird and wonderful for a myriad of reasons. It has very little dialogue but an incredible original score, containing music made by vacuum cleaners, newspapers, bicycle wheels and refrigerators. The story is somewhat bizarre yet oddly relatable in the simple, single-minded motives of the main characters, the characters themselves are quirky works of art, each drawn to be memorable for their shapes and motions, not their voices. The city of Belleville is a streetlit olive-toned urban dreamworld, a combination of Paris, New York, and Montreal, and the animation style is a blend of traditional 2d cel with “reimagined 3d” where Chomet sought to “destroy the perfect and clean look of cg and make it feel as if it was drawn by hand” in order to integrate the 2d and 3d approaches. The film features amusing cameos by Fred Astaire, Django Reinhardt and Dancer Josephine Baker, along with Madame Souza who is trying to rescue her Tour de France cyclist grandson Champion, a very fat puppy named Bruno, the Mafia, and of course, the stunning Triplets of Belleville themselves. They’ve still got it, and this film will endure for years.