"The Triplets of Belleville"...would that I had seen this one sooner than last night. As an aspiring animator, I am constantly looking for new styles of animation to help expand my vision of the genre. I have heard about this movie for some time, but now I see what all the fuss is about. One of the commentaries on the DVD described the movie as being a far cry from either Japanese anime or Disney animation, and while I did see some Disney resemblances, for the most part I must agree.

"The Triplets of Belleville" is eerily mesmerizing, and nowhere is it more so than in the beginning. The first scene, a scratchy black-and-white cartoon, harkens back to the age of Felix the Cat and Olive Oyle, but has a kind of disturbed and panicked feel more akin to a Halloween episode of "The Adams Family." The rest of the movie adopts a similar, yet cleaner and far more beautiful style. But there's something about that first scene -- and its incredibly catchy music -- that stays under your skin throughout the film.

However, the scene that really struck me -- and I don't think this is too much of a spoiler -- was one in which the characters were out at sea during a terrible storm. Now, if Hollywood had made this, you would expect this scene to have loud, pounding, crashing music, courtesy of a small studio orchestra or some guy on a keyboard, intended more to build atmosphere than to add anything in the way of mood or melody. What I wasn't expecting to hear was Mozart, and it finished the desperation of the scene so perfectly (and so unexpectedly) that I was literally trying to fumble for my remote without taking my eyes off the screen, in order to turn up the volume.

There is little else for me to say in favor of "The Triplets of Belleville," except to point out the qualities that many other reviews have already mentioned, such as the fresh and fully descriptive character designs, and the dog's enjoyable dreams and behavior (Including a perfect visualization of a dog's mind: "Train! Person on train who looks like he might be a dog! Must bark!").

But having said all that, while most of the movie was fresh and unexpected, I felt that the story's climax was rather ordinary, old-fashioned, and, well... expected. To me this part was somewhat disappointing, and also, an ending which was intended to be "artsy" and "thought-provoking," for me fell more along the lines of "ho-hum" and "mildly confusing." This movie relied so heavily on visual symbolism that I fear it occasionally forgot how to put one foot in front of the other, when it came to keeping the story's momentum.

Anyway, on quality alone I would give it no worse than three stars. But I hold strong value in an animation's originality, and "The Triplets of Belleville" is nothing short of profound in that arena, so... three-and-a-half out of four.