E-Mail This Article to a Friend Triplettes threat Can Belleville compete with Finding Nemo? BY GERALD PEARY

Sylvain Chomet, the visionary French filmmaker of Les triplettes de Belleville/The Triplets of Belleville, didn’t make it to the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Triplets is my favorite movie of 2003, and I wanted to meet its creator.

"I’m the second choice," Evgeni Tomov, Chomet’s production designer/art director told me. "One reason he’s not here: Sylvain is afraid of flying. Second, he’s focusing on a new film. The third reason: he was skeptical about the perception of Triplets in North America, saying, ‘It’s the year of Finding Nemo. It’s not a great year for French film.’ He told me, ‘I don’t want to think of Triplets now.’ He did interviews at Cannes, and he was a bit worn out."

To whom was I talking? "I’m half-Russian, half-Bulgarian," Tomov said. "I lived in Kiev, my family moved to Bulgaria, where I grew up. Fourteen years ago, I defected. I emigrated to Canada, and I’ve been living in Montreal ever since. I didn’t like the experience of a Soviet state. I never regretted leaving. My parents are still there in Bulgaria. I visit on the average every two years, and I still find it uncomfortable.

"I studied fine arts and illustration. I was doing it for years before I met Sylvain in 1995." Chomet, a comic-book illustrator, employed Tomov to paint backgrounds for the prize-winning short "La vieille dame et les pigeons/The Old Lady and the Pigeons" (1998). "It put Sylvain on the map and got three producers to invest in the feature project. On Triplets, I didn’t start out as the art director. Sylvain had the first one fired after a couple of months. He was too slow, didn’t communicate. I inherited very little: 10 or 15 drawings in pre-production.

"The film was not organized in a very orthodox manner. You see lots of credits, but we never had more than 40 or 50 working at a time. That was Sylvain’s decision; he could have a more homogeneous look. I took care of everything in the film that doesn’t move, including color and lighting, layout, and background painting. It was tough sometimes, one and a half years, six days a week, working 9 to 8, 9 to 9. I didn’t develop the characters. That’s all him, the personalities, the look. Sylvain did the entire storyboard. He’s a great animator and a great generator of original ideas. Even under stress, he remains creative. He was definitely the locomotive pulling the train forward. I’ve never worked with someone who is so multi-talented, a Renaissance talent. He’s an excellent draftsman. He plays piano, he has a great ear. He fired two composers who didn’t work out.

"It’s great working with him but not easy. It wasn’t always a positive experience, it was a package deal. He has a short fuse, a short attention span. I was perhaps the only one spared from being yelled at. A reason there are so many names on the credits: many people quit. Sylvain keeps telling me that I was more picky than him, which may be true, but I had a more smooth approach with people."

What influences did he and Chomet have when conceiving the animation?

"Sylvain credits [live-action] filmmakers like Jacques Tati, not well-known cartoons. I looked at paintings and live-action films for ambiance and atmosphere. I admire the stylish art direction of City of Lost Children and Delicatessen, and Tim Burton is a great director, but I didn’t imitate them. We did look at a bit of 101 Dalmatians for the freshness of black-and-white lines, wobbly and sketchy, merging with the actors. Of course, nobody can claim 100 percent originality, but I can’t think of a single title which we really copied."

And the marvelous composite town of Belleville?

"I had complete freedom to design my own city. An exhibit at the Montreal Fine Arts Museum of Baroque architecture was a springboard we had to jump from. In Belleville, there’s a lot of Montreal, a lot of Quebec City, Paris rooftops and penthouses, garnished with Baroque elements. Door hinges, street lights, gutters are based on the black-and-white photographs of Robert Doisneau. There’s New York as well: the Statue of Liberty, and people laugh at it being there, in what’s supposed to be a French city in the New World. But it was a gag we couldn’t resist."

The Triplets of Belleville opened last June in France, and it was a critical success and somewhat of a box-office hit. Here, the Boston Society of Film Critics voted it Best Foreign Film of 2003. "Sylvain is certain that Triplets won’t succeed in North America," Tomov said. "I’ll be happy to prove him wrong."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com