Dilili in Paris

Director, writer, and designer Michel Ocelot has said that two starting points for the production were his desire to create a work set in Paris, and an originally separate desire to create one on the topic of male suppression and abuse of women and girls.

He chose to combine these in a narrative which takes place in the Belle Époque, roughly in the 1900s, a decade in which several historical firsts for women in France were made.

The film depicts some of the many notable historical figures who were often present in the city at the time, and features a fictionalized version of the opera singer Emma Calvé as a supporting character. However, it simultaneously intentionally diverges from real history (and, as the director readily admits, laws of science) in its metaphorical main plot and inclusion of retrofuturist technology influenced by various works of Jules Verne and The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.

The 3D rendering style continues in that used in Azur & Asmar, in that the fabric, hair, and so on of the three-dimensional models is rendered as solid colours with no shading, though it differs in that the characters' bodies (which in Azur & Asmar were shaded from a fixed angle, in a style inspired by late medieval art)[7] are defined with a tracing effect developed from that used in Kirikou and the Men and Women.

The scenery incorporates photographs, taken by Ocelot over four years, of structures which survive from the depicted era or earlier, including the Palais Garnier, Bouillon Racine, Maxim's and the Paris sewers and objects from the collections of the Musée d'Orsay, Musée de l'École de Nancy, Musée Carnavalet, Musée Rodin, Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, and Musée Marmottan Monet, which are used directly as two-dimensional elements or for texture mapping rather than as reference material. Others were recreated in three dimensions, including the Eiffel Tower, which was based directly on architectural drawings from Gustave Eiffel's company. The digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica, was used for research and for two-dimensional empherea that were incorporated directly.[8]

Unlike Ocelot's two previous feature films, Tales of the Night and Kirikou and the Men and Women, Dilili has not been released in stereoscopic 3D.