Animation abroad

If you’re into old-school animation, the Northwest Film Center has a real treat in store. This weekend, Silvain Chomet’s 2003 surrealistic comedy The Triplets of Belleville will show alongside Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 fantasy My Neighbor Totoro.

The film center will screen each animated film in multiple showings throughout the weekend, including afternoon and evening showings. The screenings are being held in the place of the previously scheduled screening of A Cat in Paris (2011).

My Neighbor Totoro is a wistful Japanese fantasy that follows sisters Satsuki and Me, as they move with their father to rural Japan to live nearer to their sick mother. The pair develops a bond with a host of curious forest spirits, including the furry giant Totoro, who leads them on several magical adventures.

Their father and the other adults around them offer their respects to the children’s stories about their spirit friends but never spot the creatures themselves. Yet the young sisters find gifts and fortunes for their faith and friendship, and Totoro even lends a hand when one of the girls falls into danger.

The Triplets of Belleville, by contrast, is a dark comedy tackling more adult themes. The film centers around Madame Souza, an elderly woman raising her gloomy grandson, Champion. The somber boy grows up to become a professional bicyclist, but he and others are kidnapped mid-race during the Tour de France by members of the French mafia.

Souza and Champion’s faithful hound, Bruno, follow the criminals to the heart of the city, where they meet the Triplets of Belleville. These elderly lounge singers join them as they work to rescue Champion from servitude to the mob’s gambling machinations.

As animated foreign films, Totoro and Triplets make for a dynamic if disparate pairing. The themes and tones of the films are very different, but each is powerful in its own way. Totoro is light and whimsical, bursting with childlike energy and familial warmth. Triplets flirts with the surreal, combining intense textural detail with lumbering, abstract characters to provide a headier viewing experience.

The films visually complement one another, each with animation styles reaching back to earlier influences. The relatively recent Triplets boasts much of the polish of a newer work, but the characters and the settings hearken back to something akin to classic Disney films. Totoro, produced in the late ’80s, displays the elegance of motion and vivid detail of landscape that are common in creator Miyazaki’s work.

A family-friendly film, Totoro tells a simple story with grace and depth, relating a cast of beloved characters through interactions both heartwarming and hilarious. Children will love the antics of the spirits, and adults will appreciate the overarching themes of sisterhood and the power of imagination.

Triplets has a deceptively simple story arc, but the cunning artistry of its metaphors lend it to a more adult audience. It starts slow and solemn and gets outright zany at times with several dark moments cutting through the film’s playfulness.

The version of Totoro to be screened has been dubbed in English. Triplets features a mix of English and French, but much of the film is told purely by gesture and has little need for dialogue.

If you have children and are looking for something different to entertain them, the screening of Totoro is a great chance to see an early work by Miyazaki onscreen. If you want something a little more witty and layered, Triplets may be for you. Seen together, they are quite a film-going adventure.