Film

The Triplets of Belleville

Name: The Triplets of Belleville
Genre: Animation, Comedy, Drama, Adventure
Released: 2003
Cast: Suzy Falk, Lina Boudreau, Betty Bonifassi, Michèle Caucheteux, Jean-Claude Donda

A nearly wordless French cartoon about an ancient grandmother, her asthmatic dog and a trio of geriatric jazz singers chasing down mobsters who've kidnapped her cyclist grandson. It's grotesque, tender, jazzy and strange — hand-drawn animation with the timing of silent comedy and none of the sentimentality you'd expect. For people who want their cartoons weird and adult.

TMDb rating

7.4

If you liked this

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But It's slower and sadder, with almost no comic relief. If you wanted more chase and mayhem, this won't give it.4

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit2005

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But Much gentler and more British-cosy than Triplets' grimy surrealism — no mobsters, no menace, just village-fete stakes.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit poster

Fantastic Mr. Fox2009

Stop-motion with a jazzy, needle-drop-heavy score and a dry, adult wit hiding inside a kids'-movie shape — Wes Anderson doing his own version of sophisticated cartoon comedy.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Mon Oncle1958

Chomet built Triplets' visual-comedy grammar directly on Tati's — near-wordless storytelling, exaggerated bodies, gags told in wide shot. This is the source.

Jacques Tati's classic comedy of a bumbling uncle adrift in modern, mechanised Paris — told almost entirely through physical gags and sound design rather than dialogue. Chomet has openly cited Tati as his blueprint, and it shows.

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Kirikou and the Sorceress1998no page yet

Another wildly distinctive, non-Hollywood animated style — this one drawing on West African storytelling and folklore, with a boy hero and a genuinely inventive visual world.

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Persepolis2007

French animation for grown-ups, hand-drawn in stark black and white, telling a real coming-of-age story against the Iranian revolution — proof the medium can carry serious weight.

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My Life as a Zucchini2016

French stop-motion with big-eyed, oddly proportioned characters and a tender heart under a rough subject — orphaned kids finding family — that mirrors Triplets' ugly-beautiful character design.

But Quieter and sadder, built for feeling rather than spectacle; there's no globe-trotting adventure here.

Waltz with Bashir2008

Animated documentary about war memory that proves, like Triplets, animation can go somewhere live action can't — stylised, haunting, unmistakably adult in subject and tone.

But This is heavy, real-world trauma, not comic exaggeration — a genuinely different emotional weight class.

Chico & Rita2010no page yet

A hand-drawn animated romance soaked in Cuban jazz and swooning colour — if the music-driven mood of Triplets got you, this leans all the way into it.

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Entirely wordless, hand-drawn, meditative — a Studio Ghibli co-production that pushes the 'animation without dialogue' idea to its purest, most stripped-back extreme.

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Mother2009

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