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Review:
In Pennsylvania
there are a couple of huge model railroad layouts (like Roadside America) for
tourists, each like a whole kingdom with towns, mountains, roads, days and
nights. One could almost live inside of one of these as a toy.
And this animated film creates a whole virtual little
parallel universe, with little subkingdoms. The basic story is simple enough.
A young man (Champion) trains and then enters the Tour De France as a
cyclist, and is kidnapped. His grandmother (Madame Souza) searches for him,
with the apparent help of nightclub performers, the Triplets of Belleville
(three female music-hall stars in 1930s genre). There is little
dialogue—everything is visual, and there is no need for subtitles.
It’s the journey that makes this a great road movie with
lots of little subdomains. It starts with the
cyclist training in the streets of Paris,
and then his participation in the race. Actually, it starts early, with an
encapsulated black-and-white 50s-like performance of the Triplets performing
“Belleville Rendez-Vous,” which was nominated for
Best Song for the Oscars this year and is showing up on disco floors now.
Pretty quickly we see the fascinating art of mechanics, of technologies
communicating with each other through bicycle gears. A derailleur, for
example, runs a record changer. And there are trains of all sizes and
descriptions running everywhere, some real and some model. One of them looks
like a Civil War era steam engine, another is a
self-propelled toy streetcar. So we quickly build up the idea that real
worlds and make-believe ones are interchangeable, as if dreams were reality
or that perhaps are, in our real world, are toys manipulated by a Hemlein puppet-meister. Real
world can run into toy ones, as if we could cross branes
into parallel worlds.
The cyclist is put onto a machine where he watches a
virtual reality display while he practices on a flatbed, as they travel to Belleville,
and the Triplets will follow. There is one tremendously Tall Ship, that sails to the music of the Mozart C minor Mass,
performed romantically. Belleville,
it turns out, is a fascinating city that looks like a mix of New
York City, Trump style, and Montreal.
You want to get out of your stadium seat (I saw it at a new Landmark in Washington
and even many weeks into the engagement it was full) and explore the streets
of this play city. There is one bridge, on an high
palisade, tall enough for the Tall Ship. Across the river is a whole Dominion
to explore that is kind of like The Shire.
The colors in the film, rather than being garish as in Finding
Nemo, are subtle in hue, ranging from
black-and-white to beige to blue-blacks. But it is the extraordinary
mechanical imagination that is stunning. In one scene the Triplets perform on
bicycle spokes and refrigerator grating, and a vacuum cleaner. Then there is
the sheisk-a-bob of live frog (cruelty to animals,
anyone – they boils lobsters live, don’t they?). It’s a trip, maybe a dream,
maybe an acid trip if you want to believe it.
The song will come back in the end credits, and it is so
French (Belle-VILLE), so off the wall, so new wave, so effete. This is no kids movie, it is a delicious political satire, about
French attitudes towards America,
and separatism in Quebec, and even
about the whole history between England
and France
throughout much of the last millennium.
This film is being shown with a short Destino,
from Walt Disney Pictures (Dominque Monfery and Roy Edward Disney).
An earlier animated film with a somewhat similar effect is
the Japanese (with US English Version) Spirited Away (“Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi”) (2001, Walt Disney/Studio Ghibli, dir. Hayao Miyazaki,
125 min, PG), which is very long for an animated feature, especially a fairy
tale like this. Chihiro/Sen (Rumi
Higari) is a little girl whose family moves to the
suburbs. She enters a tunnel and finds herself in a threatening world in
which people are turned to animals, including her parents who apparently have
become pigs. There is a long adventure that strings out, including a
streetcar train the runs through a flood—creating this
another-planet/otherworld effect. The ending is a bit of a copout. The
symphonic music score by Joe Hisaishi and Youmi Kimara reminds one of
late romanticism and is most effective—sometimes with a light touch. There is
one sequence at the end that reminds me of Babe (or Babe the Gallant
Pig) (1995, dir. Chris Noonan, Universal, PG), a touching Australian story of
what it is like to be raised to be eaten—and Babe the Piglet rises to the
challenge, eventually learning to herd sheep in military fashion (note the
political message). There is that line, “you’re job is to eat your food…” and
a rather Mephistophelean feline. Were we all vegetarians.
Oliver North praised this movie on his talk show. The sequel is Babe: Pig in the City (1998)
Charlotte’s
Web (2006, Paramount/Walden Media/Nickelodeon, dir. Gary Winick, book by E.B. White, 97 min, G, Australia/USA) is
a remake of a famous 1973 kid’s film. Nickelodeon did a presentation of the
writers’ internships that it offers at the Sunsetscripts
seminars in 2006, and one can see that it takes very specific skills to write
children’s material like this. The title is a metaphor. Charlotte,
a loquacious spider (voice Julia Roberts) spins promotional webs to save
Wilbur the Piglet (voice, Dominc Scott Kay) from
becoming Christmas dinner. I wondered it the Web could be considered an
analogy to the World Wide Web, even if just a miracle for the farm families
and then at the state fair. Certainly, an insignificant animal reaches its
audience with broadcast words. The keywords to express Wilbur were “Radiant”
and then “Humble.” But the very beginning is telling, too. A little girl Fern
(Dakota Fanning) finds an extra piglet and picks him up to save him. Dad (Kevin
Anderson) tells her the facts, than pigs are farm animals, and she says, “It isn’t
his fault that he was born little.” Existential – and leading to a point that
at the end will lead to an argument for Gospel-style socialism. The very next
seen, Mother (Essie Davis) is frying bacon. Later,
the Mephistophelian rat Templeton (Steve Buscemi)
will tell Wilbur the truth, that he is headed for the smoke house. There is a
little play here on whether telling the truth is the right thing to do, or if
it is just plain sadism.
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