For his next trick: "The Illusionist"

For cineastes, The Illusionist will be a collaboration to savour: idiosyncratic French animator Sylvain Chomet directing an unfilmed screenplay by the late, great Jacques Tati - a pairing, perhaps, to rival the high-profile mindmelding of Spielberg and Kubrick on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Except that, here, the two sensibilities mesh seamlessly: Tati's wordless slapstick has transferred remarkably well to the animated form. What else, after all, was Chomet's sublime breakthrough feature Belleville Rendezvous (cycling, sight gags, heightened sound effects and Gallicry) if not a Tati film put over in pen and ink, the hand-drawn visuals providing an equally personal and distinctive stamp?

We can presume Tati wrote the title role of The Illusionist for himself circa 196o: this is Tatischeff, a greying stage magician with an especially plump and troublesome rabbit; the pair of them have crossed the Channel to embark upon a tour of the British Isles. Met with general disinterest in London - where he's regarded as at best an afterthought by the teenyboppers screaming for fresh pop sensations Billy Boy and the Britoons - Tatischeff receives a warmer welcome north of the border, and in Edinburgh (Chomet's adopted home) in particular, playing to houses of, say, ten people rather than just the two. En route, he picks up a travelling companion. Alice is an innkeeper's daughter keen to see the big city - but she, too, belongs to a different generation, apt to be distracted by televisions and shop windows.

A literal changing of the guard in the film's opening moments foreshadows the cultural seachange Tati was writing about: as the Fifties gave way to the swinging Sixties, traditional music-hall and end-of-the-pier entertainment - as embodied by Tatischeff's man in the brown suit - was heading the way of the dodo, a state of affairs that might well have struck a chord with an ageing director putting out quaint comedies at the time of the Marxist-Leninist Hitchcocko-Hawksians that made up the French New Wave. Between his nightly shows, the illusionist is confronted with further signs of his own mortality: Alice drifts off with a younger suitor she meets in a department store, while he himself stumbles into the Cameo cinema to catch a clip of Mon Oncle - the flesh-and-blood Tati on screen being at once younger and more "alive", seemingly, than his animated equivalent.

Around him - a familiar late-Tati concern, this - society is plunging, glossy-locked headfirst, into the consumer age. With the theatre Tatischeff is performing at comprehensively dwarfed by the giant advertising hoarding adjacent to it, the film's thesis is that the illusionist might represent some dishevelled artistry and humanity worth clinging to long after the last quiff has been brillantined. It's a direct fit with the traditionalism of Chomet's methods, for both magician and animator depend upon a skilful sleight-of-hand. In retrospect, part of Belleville's charm lay in its clutter: the experience was like setting foot inside an old curiosity shop, and being confronted with rows and rows of bric-a-brac to sort through. The new film is distinguished by an acute sense of light and space: its watercolour renderings of the London skyline and the Scottish climate rival anything by Turner or his Caledonian counterparts.

If some of the detail - kilted police officers, deep-fried chocolate bars, a graffito for Scottish independence - seem to belong more to a Scotland of the mind rather than specifically to the Edinburgh of the late 1950s, that's all part of the fun: by appending the imaginary to the real, his own doodles to Tati's original blueprint, Chomet can give us the best of both worlds. Take the sequence in a garage, where the animator's rare gifts for pathos and characterisation (viz. the flash-Harry client, his teeth as white as his suit and his Cadillac) chime with Tati/Tatischeff's knockabout, or that in the studios of advertising agency Publicitex, where a team of circus acrobats put the finishing touches to a brand-new soap campaign.

Despite these occasional flurries of activity, The Illusionist is slow by contemporary animation standards; younger viewers - for whom I'm almost tempted to say the film is too rich, too complex - should be briefed going in not to expect The Incredibles. Yet it's never fusty, and achieves a pacing more or less perfect for a work this concerned and tied up with the passage of time: it lingers with a purpose, the better to allow a subtler range of effects and moods, and to show what fades and passes with the day. Beautifully researched and rendered - and finally very moving - it perpetuates the genius of Tati, while confirming Chomet as right up there with the Pixar boys, Nick Park and Hayao Miyazaki in the very first rank of world animation.

The Illusionist is on selected release.