A French cartoon by Sylvain Chomet, a bande dessinée in motion, a genuine novelty. The detachable introduction presents a retro Thirties black-and-white musical pastiche (complete with scratches on the emulsion for wear and tear), faux-Fleischer and semi-surrealist, spotlighting a big-butted Josephine Baker in a bikini bottom of bananas and a big-headed Fred Astaire getting devoured by his own tap shoes. Then comes a simulated break in the film, and we realize we have been watching television -- in a full-color animated world in a more up-to-date graphic style -- in the home of a dumpling-shaped grandma, her bicycle-enthusiast adopted child, and their dog Bruno. The first half-hour is unflaggingly glorious, attaining a perfect tension between the routine of their daily life and the marvelousness of it in our eyes. Which is to say the marvelousness of it in the heightening, the distortion, the grotesquerie, the bizarrerie of the visual detail: e. g., the stomach-dragging Bruno dutifully waddling his way up a twisting staircase, right on schedule, to bark at every passing elevated train outside the bedroom window. And yet when three competitors in the Tour de France, including the now grown-up adopted child (calves the size of Popeye's forearms), are abducted in mid-race for unknown reasons by a pair of black rectangular gangsters and shipped across the Atlantic (beautifully drawn vessel, an axe blade balanced on its cutting edge) with grandma and dog in hot pursuit on a hydrocycle -- when, in short, the routine is forsaken in favor of a fantastical adventure -- the movie loses its moorings. All that heightening, that distortion, etc., piled atop a spongy base of whimsy, seem somehow less marvelous. One kind of marvel takes away from the other. And the bullets-flying climactic car chase is tiresome. Still, the wit and imagination never relent (Bruno finds new trains to bark at in the New World), and the whole of it is communicated with a clarity that renders words unnecessary. Or at any rate, unused. An unobtrusive poster of Jacques Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday pays proper hommage in that regard. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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