Surreal fitsjust fine in creepy old 'Belleville'

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After the prodigious success of "Finding Nemo" last year, it'd be forgivable to assume that computer animation has all but displaced the old school of ink and paper.

Disney did produce the offbeat and surprisingly good "Teacher's Pet" earlier this month, which blew off a few cobwebs. But "Pet," for all its cheer and wit, shrivels next to "The Triplets of Belleville," a compact, often creepy movie crammed with wonderfully grotesque characters and mechanical contraptions, and imagery that harks back to the glory days of Disney animator Winsor MacKay and the silent film era.

Born of the imagination of comic strip writer Sylvain Chomet, "Triplets" is a surreal story world where Fred Astaire is gobbled up by his dancing shoes, frogs are a delicacy and Django Reinhardt's masterful gypsy-jazz guitar mingles with Mozart's "Mass in C-minor" and vacuum cleaners double as musical instruments.

Mr. Chomet also sneaks in a few snooty polemical asides here, such as a briefly glimpsed drawing of a bloated Statue of Liberty that didn't, but may as well have, said, "Give me your rich, fat American masses." Mr. Chomet is a French expat living in Canada -- a double-whammy of woe-is-America snootiness.

Anyway, our first peek at the Triplets, a trio of singing ladies performing at a bawdy vaudevillian revue, comes from the TV set of Madame Souza, a short, plump granny with orthopedic shoes, a pair of mismatched legs and pince-nez that always seem to slip out of place.

The madame lives in a decrepit suburban house, smack-dab against a railway viaduct, with her orphaned grandson Champion, a mopey, sad sack boy with too much baby fat and not enough friends. Desperate to appease Champion -- even a puppy, Bruno, fails to satisfy for long -- Madame Souza finally springs a tricycle on him. It works.

Skipping ahead a few years, Champion is next seen in a transformed body, lean and wiry. Mr. Chomet gives him a long beak nose and exaggerated bulks of muscularity around his calves, the product of a Tour de France training regimen administered by the taskmaster grandma.

Champion submits to the grueling exercise, but the old anomie seems to have sunk in again; he competes out of fatalism rather than ambition. Mind you, the Champion character never utters a word through the entire movie; neither does Madame Souza (if you don't count her whistle-blowing). Mr. Chomet expresses their emotions purely through illustration.

Racing in the Tour de France itself, Champion is kidnapped, along with two other cyclists, by a pair of boxily-drawn Mafiosi and shuttled to the teeming megalopolis of Belleville. There, they are pressed into servitude at an underground betting parlor.