It is difficult to think of a more aptly titled movie than The Illusionist, the latest animated feature by The Triplets of Belleville director Sylvain Chomet. Based on a script by French filmmaker Jacques Tati, the script was offered to Chomet by the Tati estate after the filmmaker sought to use a Tati clip in The Triplets of Belleville. Chomet adapted the story with some minor updates and revisions (such as changing its primary location from Prague to Scotland) and set up a new studio to tackle the decades-old story, realizing it in vivid, beautifully-colored animation.

In other words, The Illusionist is an illusion on multiple levels. Its title calls attention to the fact that movies are illusions: that static photographs displayed in rapid succession at 24 frames-per-second makes us believe the images are moving. The title also calls our attention to the illusion in the kinds of paintings that present three-dimensional space. Both the film’s sense of depth and time are the products of cinematic slight of hand.

But it is the illusion of authorship that is the most fascinating, as the movie confounds the idea of auteur filmmaking. Though this work feels like the product of an individual artistic genius, it is, in fact, the labor of many hands, the communal imagination of multiple authors working together to realize every detail, right down to the color of the scraggly Scottish hilltops.

The movie’s title literally refers to its main protagonist, the Illusionist (Jean-Claude Donda), a magician who leaves Paris because his act is out of date. The man heads to London, where he lands a promising gig: following a hit rock ‘n’ roll band. After the raucous — and humorous — performance by the Jerry Lee Lewis-cum Beatles-style band, the Illusionist couldn’t have a more warmed-up audience. The curtain drops, he takes the stage, and when the curtain goes up again, the performer confronts a completely deserted auditorium. It is one of those visual jokes whose punchline could only be landed in animation.

The Illusionist is full of these kinds of inspired visual moments. The movie’s rolling, fluid style returns us — as The Triplets of Bellville did — to an appreciation of the warmth of drawn action, the way its lines and forms can coax a variety of dramatic and comedic responses from the material that seem out of reach of the digitally rendered brand of animated storytelling. So effective is Chomet’s dramatic touch that the movie’s first half hour plays as a silent film, leaving out dialogue that would only get in the way of this impeccable visual storytelling.

The Illusionist is reduced to playing weddings, and at one these engagements he meets a drunken Scot who invites the man to perform at a pub in the far reaches of the Highlands, where electricity has only just arrived at the town to dazzle the locals. With no greater stages to grace, the Illusionist takes the job, and in the back country, he is a hit. The man stays in town, beguiling the children with his slight of hand, and entertaining the locals by pulling his irritable rabbit (the source of a number of moments of slapstick) from his hat.

When the magician finally leaves the town, headed for Edinburgh, a young girl follows him. The man takes her under his wing, and they rent an apartment in a beaten-down hotel in the city. Their relationship blooms as the magician becomes the young girl’s surrogate father, buying her clothes and taking multiple jobs to support their modest life.

Meanwhile, his craft gets pushed further and further from the mainstream, until the Illusionist is forced to take a job pulling women’s underwear from his hat in the front window of a local department store. This artistic marginalization, however, is not what ultimately breaks the magician’s heart, but rather it is the girl’s maturation, as she grows up, falls in love, and eventually is pulled by life away from the wonderful old man.

Chomet’s approach to animation creates a moving, lyrical experience, and The Illusionist presents the kind of clear, simple storytelling that we are used to finding in children’s books, but whose narrative power, when put to adult themes, is not diminished. Tati’s tale is a love fable, to parents, to mentors, to art, but most of all to the melancholic beauty of life itself.