The Illusionist

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They say never meet your heroes. If French director Sylvain Chomet's latest film is anything to go by, paying them tribute can be an equally tricky business. Chomet's debut feature, the Oscar-nominated animation Belleville Rendez-Vous, with its ingenious sound design, minimal dialogue and surreal slapstick, was heavily indebted to French comic and cinematic legend Jacques Tati - openly wearing his influence on its sleeve, it even featured a scene from Monsieur Hulot classic Jour De Fete.

It makes perfect sense, then, that Tati's daughter, Sophie, approached Chomet to adapt an unmade Tati script, to which she could see no live action director or performer doing justice. Five years in the making and primarily rendered in painstaking hand-drawn animation, Chomet's envisioning of Tati's alter ego - a washed-up vaudeville magician, Tatischeff (Tati's own full name), failing to compete against rock and roll outfits filling up 60s theatres - is about as close as bringing the man back to life as one could imagine. The shuffling, bumbling body language, sad round eyes and short-trousered gangliness - trademarks which blurred the line between Tati the man and his most famous comic creation, Monsieur Hulot - are beautifully recreated.

And yet, for Belleville devotees, or those not already singing from Tati's hymn sheet, the melancholic narrative - like the Illusionist's worn-out routine - risks being too slight to keep audiences mesmerized. It revolves around Tatischeff's increasing professional irrelevance, and his bittersweet bond with young Alice, a companion-cum-surrogate-daughter who attaches herself to him after he performs on the remote Scottish island where she lives. Tati himself considered the serious tone, not to mention subject matter (controversy still rages over whether he dedicated the script to Sophie Tatischeff, or, in fact, intended it as an apologia to Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, his abandoned eldest daughter), too much of a departure from his established persona to go ahead with its production.

With its unrelenting elegiac score, and atmospheric dial set firmly to sentimental whimsy, the film's mood walks a fine tightrope between endearing and irksome. Mawkish touches seem baldly designed to activate the viewer's waterworks - we see, for instance, a dejected ventriloquist's dummy appear in a pawn shop window, first going for a pitifully low sum, then later for free; and the gauche simplicity of Alice, the only person unquestioningly enamoured by Tatishceff's tricks, occasionally feels awkwardly contrived. An early scene, when she mistakes a flurry of pillow feathers for snowflakes - believing Tatischeff has command of the skies as well as his crusty old rabbit - leaves you pondering whether she's more village idiot than charming ingenue.

At heart, though, the greatest disappointment (and irony) of The Illusionist is to see the brilliant caricaturist, conjurer and dreamer who created the spirited, bizarre and irreverently grotesque universe of Belleville Rendez-Vous working with his hands tied, bending over backwards to pay tribute to his greatest inspiration. That said, where its narrative or characters might fail to convince, it's impossible not to be captivated by Chomet's exquisitely realised vision of Edinburgh - the city Chomet himself moved to (and plainly fell in love with) in 2004, and where he chose to relocate Tati's original script.

Every frame is alive with delightful, delicate detail, and the film's closing moments capture the rain-soaked city with a lyricism unrivalled by modern 3D animation. While The Illusionist's own spell might have worn off, as darkness falls and water drops bounce with fragile luminescence off deserted pavements and empty shops, its final scene is enough to keep you believing in Chomet's magic.