Did You Know?
Visible in the Triplets' apartment is a framed poster for Winsor McCay's animated short film Gertie the Dinosaur.
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In the beginning of the movie, when they're watching TV, there's an equation in the bottom of the screen. These are Einstein's Field Equations and represent the gravitational effects produced by a given mass.
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A caricatured Django Reinhardt playing guitar can be seen early in the black and white portion of the film. The film's soundtrack sounds as though it was greatly influenced by Django's music (and he recorded a song called Belleville with Stéphane Grappelli).
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The music heard on the soundtrack as Mme. Souza and Bruno follow the ocean liner is from the opening movement (Kyrie) of Mozart's Mass in C minor.
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There is also an animated caricature of dancer/singer/performer Josephine Baker, a black American entertainer who left the U.S. in the 1920s because of the virulent racism she encountered and became a tremendous star in Europe. She was very big in Paris and often appeared in shows half-nude, as she did in this film.
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The pianist Mme. Souza and young Champion are watching on television is a caricature of the famous Canadian virtuoso, Glenn Gould, known for his piano interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach's keyboard works and for the fact that he would hum along as he played the piano (which can be heard in the film).
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The obnoxious American tourist family from Sylvain Chomet's short animated film The Old Lady and the Pigeons make a cameo on the streets of Belleville.
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The yellow-jerseyed leader of the Tour de France depicted in the film is a caricature of five-time tour winner Jacques Anquetil. It would appear that the year is 1957, the year of Anquetil's first win and the only year he participated which featured a stage finish in Marseilles.
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Visible in their apartment are pictures of the Triplets with some period stars including Charles Chaplin, there's also a picture of the Triplets on the beach with Olive Oyl.
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"Roberte Rivette", the accordionist who plays her instrument atop a truck while following the cyclists in the Tour de France, represents Yvette Horner, the mega-selling artist who still records albums and plays her accordeon to large crowds in France. Horner recently described her own experiences as very similar to those of "Roberte Rivette" in "Les Triplettes de Belleville": she continued playing her accordeon along the Tour de France route with a big smile as insects ceaselessly were caught in her teeth.
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The song performed by Madame Souza in the piano is called Uma Casa Portuguesa (A Portuguese House), and was originally performed by Amália Rodrigues, the queen of Fado music.
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The bicycles are all computer generated and traced, because the director, Sylvain Chomet, did not believe it was worth the time to get the look of the bicycles "perfect". The figures on the bicycles, however, were only thin lines in the computer generated originals, allowing the animators to breathe life into them.
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In bonus footage on the DVD of this film, the director, Sylvain Chomet, indicates that he tried to imitate the stance and walk of tall basketball stars in the triplets.
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The song heard in the background of the barbershop sequence (listed as the "Barber Song" in the closing credits) has lyrics in Italian, which are actually complete non-sequitur gibberish referring to food, clothing, Fellini movies and other words that a non-speaker of Italian would find difficult to follow.
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Also appearing in the starting black and white part of the movie, appears French singer Charles Trenet (1913-2001) with his eyes wide open as he used to do when acting in cabarets.
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The president asking in an official television address his fellow citizens to cheer on the cyclist is French statesman Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970).
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The equation which features on an opening screen, R(uv) - 1/2 g(uv)R = - 8 pi GT(uv), is similar to ones used in unimodular relativity and cosmological constant equations (where the "uv"s in parentheses are subscripts).
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Among the anti-Disney riffs in the film are a Mickey-shaped turd in a toilet, and a wallet-picture of a character in Disneyland with a lollipop that says SUCKER.
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All cars used in the movie are Citroën. This ties in with the joke that the cars cannot turn corners.
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