Madame Souza lives a modest life with her grandson, Champion. Since his parents died Champion has been a melancholy boy. Madame Souza tries to get him interested in music, but Champion has no interest. She buys him a puppy named Bruno. Although the boy likes his pet he is still down in the dumps. One day, while making his bed, Madame Souza finds a scrapbook. Inside are pictures of bicycles. Madame Souza buys the lad a tricycle. Delighted by the present, Champion spends all his time riding it around their small yard.
By the time Champion is a young adult he has become addicted to racing and is training for the Tour de France. Madame Souza becomes his trainer. When Champion begins the race Madame Souza follows along keeping an eye on his progress. At one point Madame Souza’s van is sabotaged and Champion, along with two other racers, is kidnapped by the French mafia. Using Bruno as a bloodhound, Madame Souza finds that the trail ends at the pier where a ship is leaving the harbor. Madame Souza rents a small paddle boat and follows.
Eventually the boat lands at Belleville, but Madame Souza has lost the trail and doesn’t know where to look for Champion. With no money and nowhere to go, Madame Souza and Bruno end up down by the docks, where they meet the triplets of Belleville, an old vaudeville act that has seen better days. The triplets take Madame Souza and Bruno home with them to their rundown dump of an apartment in a seedy part of town.
The triplets were, at one time, the toast of Belleville. They still go on stage to entertain patrons of a nightclub. At the nightclub is the head of the mafia and his henchmen. Bruno can smell Champion’s scent on the mob boss and alerts Madame Souza. Madame Souza and the Triplets of Belleville band together to find and save Champion from the clutches of the mob.
“The Triplets of Belleville” AKA “Les Triplettes de Belleville” AKA “Belleville Rendez-vous” was released in 2003 and was written and directed by Sylvain Chomet. It is an animated adventure comedy, and is a collaboration between France, Belgium, Canada and the United Kingdom. The movie was nominated for two Academy Awards, won the Cesar for Best Film Music, and as a co-production with Canada won the Genie Award for Best Motion Picture and the BBC Four World Cinema Award in 2004. Many regard it as a classic, especially with its use of “groundbreaking animation”.
Although the movie is funny in many spots, there is also a sadness to it. It is filled with lots of stereotypes, most of them overly exaggerated as well as caricatures of famous people. There is very little dialogue to the film, which is fine since most of it is visual.
In 2017, a French teacher at the DeKalb School of the Arts in DeKalb County, Georgia, at the request of a student, showed a film clip from the cartoon movie “The Triplets of Belleville” to her students. The three-minute clip was the first three minutes of the film and contains a musical number sung in French and English. The film is recommended for children aged 12 and over. The school educates grades 9-12. The school received a complaint from a parent claiming that the film was racist and sexist. The clip includes caricatures of fat entitled women, an exaggerated depiction of Josephine Baker (an African American French actress and exotic dancer, who was prominent in the civil rights movement), and men in the audience turning into monkeys and attacking the scantily dressed Ms. Baker. Had the parent actually seen the movie they would have, hopefully, realized that everyone was picked on and exaggerated, not just entitled women and one woman of color that the parent couldn't even name.