The Triplets of Belleville, Destino

Saw the Triplets of Belleville along with Destino at the Dobie.

Destino is an animated short that finishes off an unfinished collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali; it has all the melting clocks and visual imagination you’d expect from a duo like that. Here in town, it’s only playing at the Dobie, but it’s worth it. Apparently the original project didn’t get beyond conceptual sketches–what we saw was all computer-generated.

The Triplets of Belleville is another animated movie, and it’s wonderful. It has no dialogue, very much like Mr Hulot’s Holiday, and in fact, it made a couple of explicit references to that. The characters are (pardon the pun) two-dimensional, but there’s so much visual and auditory inventiveness I just didn’t care. The movie rewards careful viewing, and demands a pretty good visual vocabulary to get much out of it. It also, I have to point out, was made by someone who loves bikes and bike racing, and he gets right a lot of little details that only another bike person would notice.