LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE Opens Dec. 18 * 80 minutes, in French and Portuguese * Theatre Times Square in Tokyo

France might not be known for its savoir-faire in the field of animation, but that's about to change.

With the Oscar-nominated ``Les Triplettes de Belleville'' (The Triplets of Belleville), director Sylvain Chomet has served notice to animators in such strongholds of the genre as the United States and Japan that the land of cerebral cinema can more than hold its own against Mickey Mouse and Pikachu.

The film is the best of the bunch this holiday season-and that's saying a lot, given the embarrassment of riches out there: Robert Zemeckis' ground-breaking ``The Polar Express,'' Pixar's ``The Incredibles'' and Academy Award winner Hayao Miyazaki's ``Hauru no ugoku shiro'' (Howl's Moving Castle).

What ``Les Triplettes de Belleville'' lacks in big-budget production values, it makes up for in inventiveness and style. It's a welcome reminder that the latest technology isn't a substitute for imagination.

Rather than rely on a computer, Chomet hand-painted a large portion of the cels needed to bring his often surreal story to life. The nature of the creative process affected the outcome.

``It's like music,'' Chomet said in a recent interview. ``A lot of different instruments play their own parts.''

Among the first to strike a chord with viewers in Chomet's debut feature film, which was nominated this year for the Academy Awards for best animated feature and best song, are his characters, who sport peculiar visages.

``I've been drawing characters with very strong faces since my childhood,'' the 41-year-old animator says, adding that he never really set out to do so.

Typical is Madame Souza, an elderly Portuguese woman who lives with her pudgy pooch Bruno in a small house in the countryside.

Her days are spent grooming her grandson Champion for cycling's famed Tour de France, a race that's been in his sights ever since she bought him a bike when he was a kid.

Things go wrong when mobsters kidnap Champion during the race, hoping to use him in one of their gambling schemes. Determined to rescue the lad, Madame Souza and Bruno cross the Atlantic in a pedal boat, arriving in Belleville, a colorful metropolis that looks like a parody of an American city.

It is here that the duo come across the triplets of the title: three old women who eat frogs and make music with vacuum cleaners and other appliances. Joining forces, they rescue Champion from his captors.

``Mix Madame Souza and the triplets together, and you have my grandmother,'' Chomet says. ``I heard from my dad and everybody that knew her that she was a great woman with a very big heart.''

She died when Chomet was 3, so his most vivid memory of her stems from an 8mm film that he saw when he was 9.

``Someone told me she even punched the priest at one time,'' Chomet says with a laugh.

``Les Triplettes de Belleville'' benefits greatly from the director's attention to detail. There's something to discover in every corner of the screen-in the beautifully rendered landscapes, the hodgepodge of strange-looking spectators at the Tour de France and the back alleys of bustling Belleville.

Since there are no more than five lines of dialogue in the entire film, even non-Francophone viewers can surmount the language barrier and immerse themselves in the visual splendor of Chomet's film. In effect, it's a silent movie.

``All the characters in `The Triplets' are mime artists because the animators are mime artists,'' the director says.

Though dark at times, ``Les Triplettes de Belleville'' does not skimp on humor. The mafiosi, who are rendered in exaggeratedly rectangular shapes, are good for a few belly laughs, as is Bruno's fear of trains, which was brought on by the experience of having his tail run over by a toy train as a puppy. These lighter moments make the film enjoyable for children, offering them the chance to discover that there's more to animation than Disney and Japanese anime.

Though ``Les Triplettes de Belleville'' is a great step forward for one French animator, Chomet is cautious when it comes to predicting the emergence of a major movement.

``French animation doesn't exist,'' says Chomet, who previously had to turn to Canada and Britain to find work. He is now based in Scotland.

``Animation is based on sharing things with a team spirit,'' he says. ``French people are too individualistic to do that.''(IHT/Asahi: December 10,2004)