Dilili in Paris

An animated film set in Paris. The year is the early 1900s. There is an exhibition in the city and new inventions everywhere. Dilili is a small girl who came from New Caledonia. She sits on a stage at an exhibition and people look at her. She leaves it. There are abductions in the city. Only girls are disappearing. Dilili starts investigating. Her helper is Orel. He drives a motorised delivery tricycle and knows the city street by street. From there the film is a story of wandering. The two go through Paris and meet someone at every stop. Those people are real. Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, Sarah Bernhardt, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Debussy, Proust and many more. Each gives a piece of the thread. The abductors have an organisation. They consider themselves superior and hold that women must not be seen, must not speak, and must crawl on the ground. What the narrative is interested in is not detection but equality: its idea is that a great explosion of science and art and a movement wanting to erase women entirely existed in the same city at the same time. Dilili's own position is inside the narrative too. She comes from a colonial administration and is treated in Paris as an object of curiosity. The backgrounds come from real photographs. Michel Ocelot photographed Paris and placed the characters over them, and that mixture makes the film's look. The method is contested. To some viewers it is striking; to others the figures look detached from the background. The narrative is aimed at children but its subject is not. Violence is not shown, but what happened is stated plainly. Prunelle Charles-Ambron, Enzo Ratsito and Natalie Dessay are in the voice cast. Michel Ocelot wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes French animation and Paris of the period. Who it is not for: anyone bothered by being lectured; the narrative states its message very openly and its last section is nearly a speech.