I saw The Triplets of Belleville in theaters in 2003 and have been passively intending to rewatch it ever since. I finally did the other day and could barely stand it.

Not because it’s not great. It’s the kind of animated world you can click into easily and that feels like a memory, even on the first watch. I regularly list it when people ask me what my favorite cartoon films are. I just hadn’t remembered finding it so scary.

A French-language 2D animation, The Triplets of Belleville is marketed as an adventure/comedy about a kidnapping. A cyclist is taken by mobsters, and his grandmother and dog must team up with some elderly lounge singers to get him back.

The American mind perceives animated films as kids movies, but one early hint that this one isn’t is the dog. He’s achingly loveable, but not exactly cute. Anyone who has seen a dog age is familiar: the way their feet slide around on linoleum tiles before attempting a staircase. The senseless frenzy in their face when barking back at a loud noise. The prolonged watery eye contact.

If the dog’s physicality is heavy-handed, the portrayal of a workout regimen is what sends The Triplets of Belleville into horror movie territory.

When I was little and watching it in theaters, I wanted to be a professional athlete, and I loved extremes. (My dad thought I should become an animator, which is why we’d gone to see this movie.) The idea of a life spent sleeping in a twin sized bed and exercising full time and eating mounds of vegetable protein off of a plastic plate would have sounded okay. No drinking, no sex, no meeting new people.

The grimness didn’t register then. Now, watching the routine that makes up the cyclist’s life pre-kidnapping, I felt myself searching for excuses to hit pause and leave the room. His eyes glaze over during the hardest parts of his workout and don’t unglaze after. His calves are so big they knock against each other, and his waist is the width of my wrist. His post-workout meal is a gray-green mass with chunks and slivers of lighter shades of green that he eats with a spoon. When he’s done, it goes right into the dog’s bowl, and you can feel in your bones these aren’t human leftovers being given to a dog; it’s food made equally for both.

By the time he gets kidnapped, it’s a relief. In this world, evil is trite and random, and the real scare factor is found in daily routine. It’s not an action movie where someone gets kidnapped; it’s a horror movie about being an athlete. It illustrates that to train seriously is to live in a narrow, dark box.

When I quit the track team my senior year of college, I knew my life was going to open up in a big way, and it scared me. I couldn’t imagine living without a larger, numerical goal in front of me all the time and a rigid training schedule. Not to mention the smugness of being a student-athlete. We used to call people that didn’t play sports NARPs, for “non-athletic regular person.” Secretly, I wondered how people who didn’t train seriously could even look at themselves in the mirror. How did these people know when to eat or that they deserved food at all? To put off finding out, I signed up for a triathlon training PE class.

The people in the class were mild and friendly. One girl’s resting heart rate was what would be considered a medical emergency for most people. Another loved anime. I couldn’t relate to them at all. Short of weaning off of varsity athlete life, I didn’t get why someone would sign up to train for a self-timed college campus triathlon. They were going the opposite direction of me, towards exercising seriously, and it felt like running down a subway staircase that everyone else is mounting. I was embarrassed for all of us.

While I was no longer on a strict daily training schedule, or having to write down everything I ate in a spiral notebook to hand to our assistant coach to be read aloud at random, I still had some structure to hold onto. I didn’t let myself think about what life would be like when the semester was over and I no longer was living in the shadow of an approaching triathlon. I pretended I would continue to seek out triathlons wherever I lived in the world. I would not ever be a NARP.

The cyclist in Triplets of Belleville is further gone than I ever was. If I felt condescension towards people who don’t work out, he doesn’t seem to be aware of other people at all. His eyes don’t fix on anything, and his facial expressions are so subtle as to be unchanged, whether he is biking his heart out to mount a steep hill or waking up chained by his neck to the inside of a ship or eating slop food off a plate.

Upon rewatch, this movie doesn’t feel like a kidnapping movie at all, because his life doesn’t become worse when he is kidnapped. His life hardly changes. It’s like he’d voluntarily entered a state of captivity when he devoted his life to cycling. Being snatched by mobsters is a formality.

My first year out of college, I was living in Belgium and training to be a 2D animator. This involved waking up before the sun to commute to my job, taking the train on weekends to other cities to catch DJ sets or walk around by myself, and drinking beer so much stronger than beers in America that I would sometimes black out. When my Canadian friend, the girlfriend of one of the DJs, suggested we both train for a half marathon, I said absolutely. I went on runs after work for two days in a row and on the third day left work intending to run but didn’t, and then never did again. If I worked a job with long hours and went on a run every day, every other part of my life would have ground to a halt. I chose the DJ sets and sleeping in and going to brunch with people I’d just met and could barely understand due to my limited French over being a runner. I felt sheepish about it for months.

One evening in college, the same assistant coach who made us write down everything we ate in a notebook called a spontaneous meeting for sprinters and throwers. We sat on folding chairs, and he paced back and forth in swish pants, reminding us that running D3 track is something most people cannot do. We were student-athletes because we were different (better) than people who go to college and aren’t on a sports team.

Now, barely graduated, I wasn’t budgeting time to run. I was no longer better or more special than the non athletic regular people I’d sneered at in college. At the time, skipping out on half marathon training felt like a grave personal failure. But rewatching The Triplets of Belleville, I’m reframing it as a close call with being kidnapped back into athletic training.

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