Oh, To Live In Belleville!

Got to view Sylvain Chomet's animated feature, The Triplets of Belleville, over the holiday weekend, and already I've been avidly pushing this strange French-Canadian cartoon to my FA friends. The story of a kidnapped cyclist and the aged grandmother who leaves their country home to find him (in the company of the most believably neurotic dog you'll ever see in a cartoon), the largely non-verbal cartoon is awash in marvelous fat imagery. Belleville, the city where our missing cyclist has been carted, is a caricaturized America – even the Statue of Liberty that we see in the city harbor is super-sized and holding onto a burger – but it's not a vicious caricature. Instead, we regularly see massive women, men and kids (one with a tee-shirt emblazoned with an "I Love Fat" heart logo) going about their business, happily unconcerned about their size. Easily offended national chauvinists – the ones who'll scour foreign works for an anti-American put-down just so they'll have the opportunity to indulge in their own xenophobic insults – will probably see every massive femme waddling in the background as a slam on "fat-&-greedy Americans." Me, I saw a lotta delightful cartoon imagery. . .