Featuring the voices of Michíƒ ¨le Caucheteux, Jean-Claude Donda, and Monica Viegas. Rated PG.

If the second half of this film were as good as the first, The Triplets of Belleville would have to be considered the greatest animated feature of all time. Sylvain Chomet's celebration of bike-racing, 1960s France, basset hounds, 1930s New York, and the invincible love of grandmothers everywhere comes up short only after the characters arrive in the fictional metropolis of Belleville (a deliberate mélange of Montreal and Manhattan, with no connection to the notorious Parisian neighbourhood of the same name). From this point onward, despite the impressive New World backgrounds created by the director's talented team of French, Belgian, and Québécois animators, I found myself wondering why the hell we couldn't have stayed in Marseilles.

Clearly aimed at an international market, Triplets contains virtually no dialogue, and most of that is either blasted from TV sets or silkily sung. What this means is that subtitles are unnecessary (as in Jacques Tati farces, one of the film's comic touchstones). Despite its dazzling array of cultural references (during the first five minutes alone, Django Reinhardt, Charles Trenet, Fred Astaire, and Josephine Baker strike brief cameos in Triplets' delightfully delirious film within a film), the producers clearly wanted to create something that could be enjoyed equally well in Rio de Janeiro and Ulan Bator.

The hero of the piece is not Champion, the would-be Tour de France winner, but Madame Souza, Champion's indestructible, clubfooted grandmother. In order to make her grandson happy, this pintsize titan first provides him with a dog, the railroad-hating Bruno, then trains him to the peak of cycling perfection. When Champion is kidnapped by the French mafia and transported to Belleville for nefarious purposes, Madame Souza peddles a one-franc paddleboat across the Atlantic, enlisting the aid of the now aged Triplets, the singing sensations of the 1930s, along the way.

Of all the film's gloriously grotesque characters, Bruno is by far the most memorable. Anyone who has ever loved an elderly basset will immediately warm to the dog's comic bloody-mindedness as he ceaselessly tries to avenge a childhood hurt. Even if he does occasionally double as a tire on windy mountain roads, Bruno is probably the most convincing fictional canine since the one imagined by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

To be fair, the second half of Triplets isn't bad, exactly (a thoroughly disgusting frog-eating sequence excepted); it just seems painfully pedestrian in relation to the first.

It's all Chomet's fault, of course. If he hadn't transported us to heaven, we couldn't complain about being sent back to earth.