The Ghost of Dave Fleischer
In the opening minutes of Belleville Rendez-vous, the feature-length
cartoon released in the U.S. in November 2003 as The
Triplets of Belleville, the French animator-director Sylvain
Chômet reveals his program for the entire film, although it's
not clear for a while just how sly and subtle that program is.
opening minutes, black-and-white animation in the style of Max and
Dave Fleischer's Talkartoons, echo the Fleischer cartoons' squirming
animation and cheerfully bizarre transformations. It's relatively
easy now to capture the surface of that early-thirties Fleischer
styleit was done very well a few years ago in the animated
music video The Ghost of Stephen Fosterbut much harder
to capture its essence, because the circumstances that resulted
in such peculiar cartoons were themselves so peculiar. The most
distinctive qualities of the Fleischer cartoons were, as I wrote
in Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation
in Its Golden Age, the product of "happy accidents."
The Fleischer cartoons had "an essentially mechanical, unimaginative
core"thanks to an insistence on slow, evenly timed animationthat
was embellished in "a glancing, all but random way" by
Dave Fleischer, who wanted a gag in every scene and the characters
in constant motion. "Interpolating bizarre gags and rhythmic
twitching into cartoons otherwise dominated by smooth, unaccented
animation meant that those cartoons took on a hallucinatory quality:
they were, in their zombielike pacing, their aimlessness, and their
arbitrary transformations, literally dreamlike."
Making Fleischeresque cartoons that really feel like Fleischer
cartoons is akin to trying to recall a dream a few minutes after
waking. There is none of that dreamlike quality in Chômet's
opening homage, and no attempt at it. The feature proper is wholly
dreamlike, though, and it's soon apparent that Chômet has
understoodhow consciously I don't knowthat the only
way to achieve a Fleischer-like result today is by adopting a strategy
directly opposed to the Fleischers' reliance on "happy accidents."
There is nothing in the least accidental about Belleville Rendez-vous;
rather, Chômet has proceeded as if in a heightened state of
awareness. Every detail of every frame is the product of a calculating
mind that I'm sure Max and Dave would have found incomprehensible.
Having demonstrated in his film's opening minutes that he can reproduce
the surface of the Fleischer style, Chômet immediately departs
from it. Although he makes occasional effective use of computer
animation, Belleville Rendez-vous is overwhelmingly hand-drawn,
in a sophisticated style that owes nothing to the Fleischer cartoons.
("I draw," Chômet has said, "and it's drawing
that interests me.") The Fleischer cartoons are present throughout
Belleville Rendez-vous only in a ghostly way, as a reference
point for Chômet's precisely executed artistic decisions,
most notably in his handling of his characters.
The character designs grew out of the tradition of French political
caricature (the caricature of Charles De Gaulle early in the film
is a signal of what Chômet is up to). The characters thus
owe far more to Daumier than to any American models. Whereas American
caricature has tended to be gentlethink of Al Hirschfeld's
work, beautiful as drawings but with no hint of criticism of his
subjectsthe European variety has been far colder, even savage.
The three principal characters in BellevilleMadame
Souza, her grandson the bicyclist Champion, and his dog Brunoare
all grotesques whose designs create distance between them and the
audience. To invoke Fred Moore's famous criterion, they have no
"appeal." Moreover, they are allowed only enough traces
of emotion to banish any sense that they are mere robots. They are
not shallow, like many more obviously "expressive" charactersthey
are instead opaque, deliberately so.
The Fleischers were indifferent to how appealing their characters
were, and they were correspondingly careless with character designs,
but Chômet knew that such indifference would become less amusing
than annoying over the length of a feature. He thus achieves a Fleischer-like
effectcharacters that seem strange and remotenot by
neglecting his characters, but by giving them intense attention,
molding them in a way that places obstacles in the path of any temptation
to identify with them. The city of Belleville itself is similarly
odd, a wildly baroque New York most of whose residents are morbidly
obese (another example of that savagely satirical European tradition
The "virtual bicycle race" that drives the plot is exactly
the sort of thingsinister but ridiculousthat might turn
up in an early-thirties Fleischer cartoon. In keeping with Chômet's
sensitivity to the requirements of his film's length, whole sequences
are like weird throwaway Fleischer gags inflated to monstrous size,
as when the Triplets (a young singing trio in black and white, much
older but still singing the same nonsense lyrics in color) use explosives
to harvest the frogs that are the mainstay of their diet. The few
"real" gagsthe kinds of gags that would be underlined
in a conventional Hollywood cartoon, as when the dog is drafted
into duty as a wheel for a van, or Madame Souza trips the villains'
car with her orthopedic shoearrive in the offhanded manner
of the Fleischer throwaways.
Chômet's use of sound is, again, like a clever updating of
a Fleischer model. To quote Hollywood Cartoons again: "Typically,
in a postrecorded Fleischer cartoon of the early thirties, most
of the dialogue is muttered, with no attempt at synchronization;
mouth movements have been animated for only a few lines of dialogue,
emphatically voiced. The Fleischer cartoons sound just as random
and accidental as they look."
Such casualness wouldn't pass muster today, but Chômet achieves
a similarly otherworldly effect by shunning dialogue almost entirely
and using spoken words only as background noise. If we can't understand
what De Gaulle is saying when he speaks on television, it simply
doesn't matter, no more than it matters that the unsynchronized
dialogue in the Talkartoons is mere chatter. The principal Belleville
characters' silence is eerie, but not unbelievable. Considering
how odd they are in other respects, it seems perfectly reasonable
that they would be close-mouthed.
Even Chômet's use of an excerpt from Mozart's C Minor Mass
to accompany Madame Souza's pursuit of her kidnapped grandson could
be parsed as an analogue to the Fleischers' appropriation of existing
songssongs that sometimes didn't really belongfor their
cartoons. I don't want to pursue the comparisons that far, though.
Belleville is filled with sounds and imagesthe towering
freighter, the coffin-shaped gangstersthat reinforce the dreamlike
atmosphere but don't have any obvious parallels in the Fleischer
cartoons. Chômet's strategy allowed him enormous flexibility
in pursuing a very specific result.
Belleville Rendez-vous was made at studios in France, Belgium,
and Canada. Chômet himself has worked as an animator in England
and on character designs for Disney in Canada, but even though he
has spoken of animation as "essentially an Anglo-Saxon genre,"
Belleville is very much a French filmhighly intelligent,
relentlessly logical, and more than a little chilly. If I have reservations
about it, they arise from its implicit rejection of what I've described
as animation's greatest strengthits ability to erase the difference
between "inner" and "outer," so that animated
characters are wholly present on the screen in a way that even the
best actors cannot be. Chômet, like the Fleischers before
him, closes off his characters instead. However intriguing the results,
in films like the Fleischers' Snow White or Chômet's
Belleville Rendez-vous, there is a cost involved, and I'm
not sure it's worth paying.
It's true, historically, that live-action cinema grew out of primitive
forms of animation, rather than the reverse, but I think it's also
true that hand-drawn animation's capacity for artistic expression
preceded and still exceeds that of live-action films. Overwhelmingly,
the impulse behind live-action films has been to conceal the evidence
of artifice, to make them seem more like a record of real events;
and, paradoxically, the more successful that effort, the more alienating
the surviving evidence of artifice becomes. With hand-drawn animation,
though, there can never really be any question of concealing artifice,
even when the animation is most "realistic," and so the
filmmakers can concern themselves not with how true their film looks,
but with how true it is.
To judge from his statements as well as his film, Sylvain Chômet
is a dedicated partisan of hand-drawn animation, but Belleville
Rendez-vous, despite its many undeniable virtues, does not respond
to that opportunity but instead clambers into one of those niches
reserved for eccentric, one-of-a-kind films. I look forward to seeing
it again, but I'll return more often, and with greater enthusiasm,
to the handful of hand-drawn animated features and the few dozen
short cartoons that open up whole worlds.
[Posted February 29, 2004]