Animated Triplets Of Belleville charms with jazz and offbeat characters.

French animator Sylvain Chomet’s feature debut The Triplets Of Belleville is like one of the most charming and whimsical cartoon shorts in a tournée of animation, blown up to feature length. There have been lusher cartoon features, and some more technically dazzling, but Chomet stakes out a territory uniquely his own with the delicious retro-Euro look and feel of this beautifully hand-painted film.

With a plot that revolves around the national bicycle race, the Tour de France, the story couldn’t be more French. Chomet’s artistic and cultural influences come from all over the globe and he gleefully pays homage to all of them. Triplets opens with a wonderful black-and-white flashback to the Jazz Age, done in the style of a vintage Max Fleischer Betty Boop cartoon. Vocal trio the Triplets of Belleville are singing in a swanky nightclub, their lyrics a daffy, indecipherable Franglish, the catchy rhythm irresistible. Between choruses, the Triplets are joined onstage by a shimmying, bare-breasted Josephine Baker (complete with her famous banana loincloth) and tap-dancing Fred Astaire. Django Reinhardt plays swing guitar in the orchestra pit.

This is all prologue for the story of Madame Souza, a small, stout, loving grandmama with one giant orthopedic shoe, and her lonely grandson Champion. She tries everything to cheer the boy up, including a puppy (which soon grows into the enormous, devoted hound Bruno, one of the funniest, best-animated movie dogs ever). But nothing else perks up little Champion until she gets him a tricycle. Flash-forward to the 1960s (we can tell from the hound-like visage of President DeGaulle on TV) where Champion has become a long, lean, greyhound of a bicyclist training for the Tour de France, his back perpetually curved forward like a question mark, his thigh and calf muscles bulging. When he cycles up and down the cobbled back streets of Paris at night, his little granny follows on his old tricycle, blowing a whistle to set the pace.

But in the middle of the Tour de France (Chomet has great fun with the variety of French spectators lining the roads to watch), Champion and two other competitors are kidnapped by sinister men in black. It’s up to intrepid little Madame Souza and Bruno to give chase. They cross the ocean to the soaring metropolis of Belleville—a city of huge skyscrapers, insane traffic, jumbo hamburgers, and alarmingly fat people. There, the plucky old lady and her dog are discovered by the now elderly, eccentric Triplets, who take them into their home and join in the quest to rescue Champion.

Chomet’s sound design is ingenious (the thoroughbred cyclists wheeze and whinny like prize racehorses). But there’s so little actual dialogue, subtitles aren’t needed to follow the action. The film’s major delight is in the visual details. Madame Souza’s homey, cluttered little stovepipe of a house on the outskirts of Paris is bent askew by a rail line that runs practically through it. Chomet spoofs French cuisine in the many ghastly frog dishes on which the Triplets dine (including frozen frogs on a stick). The impoverished but still upbeat Triplets perform music on such found instruments as refrigerator shelves, a vacuum cleaner, and a newspaper. And the pen and ink and watercolor landscapes of Paris, Belleville, and the ocean are gorgeously rendered.

Slightly less interesting is the subplot about the French mafia located in Belleville (their building in the city skyline is a huge wine bottle). And the movie feels a bit long, especially in the car-chase finale, however cleverly done. But there is so much to see in every frame, the music is so infectious, the humor so offbeat, and Chomet’s mix of whimsy and earthiness so inspired, The Triplets Of Belleville is not to be missed.

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE [3 1/2 stars]

Directed by Sylvain Chomet

(Rated PG-13, 80 mins)