Triplets nearly upstaged by theater

With spring coming on, I'm less inclined to sit around in Mycroftian isolation, pondering the world through the frame of a computer screen. And so I and a library co-worker headed over to the nearby Michigan Theater yesterday for a showing of The Triplettes of Belleville. It's truly bizarre and innovative animation, set in a weird, visually distorted and frequently threatening world recognizably related to our own. It's a place that the blandly homogeneous, committee-written heroes and heroines of MouseCorp would never dare enter.

Part of the fun, for me, was in recognizing some of the animators' visual puns and allusions. Oceangoing ships tower absurdly into the sky like exaggerated versions of the iconic Normandie posters of the 1920's, and a historically accurate animated version of Richard Trevethick's pioneering 1804 steam locomotive appears in two or three sequences. Other images and sequences from the movie are, so far as I know, purely original, and unsettlingly effective, like the gangster/thugs who all share a certain menacingly interchangeable black ... er ... rectangularity. One of the subtle joys of the movie is the observing the way that the characters' actions, facial expressions, and miscellaneous sounds convey the story with no need for subtitles or translations. I'm reluctant to say more, because part of the fun of seeing such a movie is the surprise factor, and the delightful way that even the most improbable events neatly link together. I highly recommend seeing it. Don't arrive late, because you'll miss a hilarious song-and-dance routine featuring several recognizable pop-culture icons, some of whom meet unfortunate fates. Don't leave early, either. (Someone is still waiting....)

I, for once, did not arrive late, because I had heard that the Michigan Theater itself is worth seeing. And it is worth seeing, having been built at the height of the era when movie theaters were constructed as extravagant palaces instead of prefabricated boxes, and recently restored from top to bottom. It's also worth hearing. It's one of the few surviving theaters to still have its original, working 1920's theater organ still in place, proudly mounted on a hydraulic lift to one side of the stage. A be-tuxed organist serenades the audience with pop tunes and free-form improvisations between movies before being lowered to the floor, still playing, as the movie starts.

This is definitely the place to see my next showing of The General or some other silent-film classic.