Wow. Last night we saw “The Triplets of Belleville” at Salem’s one and only “art house,” Salem Cinema—an Italian soda/truffle oasis in the Coke/popcorn desert of our local movie-going options. I loved the song from this animated movie that was nominated for an Oscar, but the snippet from “The Triplets of Belleville” that was shown at the Academy Awards doesn’t begin to do justice to the amazing originality of this artistic creation.
As Ebert notes in the linked review above, this is a movie that you can’t neatly categorize in the usual “X meets Y” fashion, as in horror flick meets teen comedy, or whatever. No, I kept saying to myself, “I’ve never seen anything like this, and I never will again. How could a human mind create this story and these images? And how could I get such a mind?”
Back in college I wrote a major term paper on Arthur Koestler’s classic book, “The Act of Creation.” His central thesis, inasmuch as I can remember it, is that creativity is a melding of seemingly disparate dimensions, discovering heretofore hidden connections between subjects (whether of material, mental, or spiritual nature) that normally are considered separate and distinct. True enough, yet this doesn’t take us beyond the “X meets Y” creative act. Who came up with X, with Y? What is the ultimate source from which creativity springs?
It isn’t hard to take this and that, and make something new from them. We applaud artists, writers, politicians, actors, architects, businesspeople, athletes, everyone who makes us say, “That’s really creative.” But I give a standing ovation to those who make me say, “That’s unbelievable.” Unbelievable, because it doesn’t seem to have been fashioned from anything familiar. It is utterly fresh, utterly original, utterly unique, utterly one of a kind.
And this is what “The Triplets of Belleville” made me say. Yes, there is a familiar world in this movie. The Tour de France. Mafia. Controlling mothers. Performers beyond their prime. Overweight dogs whose purpose in life is to bark at passing trains. However, the eyes through which we see this world, and the details of the world itself, take us into a place we’ve never been—a great gift for a mere $8.
It might seem strange that I was so inspired by a movie laced with such crude humor—catching frogs with explosives, a mother who gives her son a truly weird massage after bicycling training, hugely fat women with male hangers-on literally hanging from their butt.
Yet, in addition to the pure entertainment value of “The Triplets of Belleville” I was entranced by the notion that this movie sprang from a human mind closely akin to my own in process and structure, if not in content and experience. This mind of the creator of “The Triplets of Belleville” was able to tap into a creative source that, I’m confident, is accessible to all of us. We just need to learn how to find it, the key to which may very well be unlearning what has caused us to forget it.
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