#tripletsofbelleville

The Triplets of Belleville (2003)

Last weekend i attended the Triplets of Belleville cine concert as a part of the Auckland Art Festival. Overall a well worth experience and I pulled a few things away from it that I can apply to the block mk. 2 animation.

A lack of dialogue. The film only had maybe 5 sentences of spoken dialogue throughout the whole thing and even those were in French. Nevertheless the story still had plenty of emotion and was extremely easy to follow. A lot of this is through visual techniques but also the music and sound effects that are used through it. These always communicated feelings of characters in a way that was just as/ more effective than dialogue. With my initial BLOCK project I spent maybe two days total on the sound of the project. As a result, the project probably wasn’t anywhere near as strong as it could have been on the sound design front. This time I think that it would be worth investing more time in sound to really convey emotion.

Exaggerate. It’s an animation, whatever you can draw can be shown. Why not make the tour de france cyclists grotesquely skinny with no other function other than cycling? Why not make a grenade explode sending an infinitely high tower of water into the air? Something that I believed was a weak point in my project last year was the fact that the actions of characters were too small to be noticed by the audience. This year I want to exaggerate actions a lot more.

Another thing is to reflect personalities of people through how they look. Whether it be their clothes, their facials, the way they walk or even the shape of their body.

The story is too bizarre and wonderful to summarize, but it leads Madame Souza to "Belleville, a Manhattan-like dream city populated by obese hamburger eaters, cretinous Boy Scouts, and a diminutive red-nosed French mafia chieftain. Belleville (not to be confused with the Paris neighborhood of the same name) is also the home of the Triplets, now ancient, who subsist entirely on frogs and frog byproducts and who make infectious music out of household appliances and carefully preserved newspapers- A.O. Scott (NYtimes)