The story here is fairly unexceptional: a boy grows up dreaming of winning the Tour De France and is coached to that end by his indefatigable grandma, until he's abducted by a nefarious mafioso and she sets out to rescue him. The pleasure is rather in all the incidental detail: each OTT characterisation is imbued with a spark of life and individualism that modern Disney's mass-production wisecracking animals are wholly lacking, and the pacing, even when the action gets frenetic, still allows room for each witty contrivance to breathe before moving on. Chomet also has an acute sense of staging and perspective, which makes for captivatingly vertiginous shots without the crutch of 3-D.
If there's a downside, it's that it's too enchanted with its inventiveness to leave much of an emotional residue. But it's hard to be uncharmed.
7/10
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