A Cat in Paris

Made at the Lyon studio Folimage by Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol, A Cat in Paris was a modest French production that almost nobody in the English-speaking world had seen when the Academy nominated it for Best Animated Feature in 2012, alongside Rango and two Hollywood sequels. The nomination is still the best-known thing about it, and it deserves better.

Zoé's father was a policeman, killed by a gangster called Victor Costa; her mother Jeanne is the detective on the case; Zoé has stopped speaking. The family cat, Dino, divides his time between the girl's bedroom and the rooftops of Paris, where he keeps company with a burglar named Nico. One night Zoé follows him. The film runs seventy minutes, moves like a caper, and is drawn by hand in flat planes and jagged, expressionist perspective — Felicioli's backgrounds owe more to Matisse and to Dufy than to anything in commercial animation.

It is a children's film with a genuine body count and an authentically frightening villain, in the tradition of European animation that has never accepted that young audiences require reassurance. The night-time rooftop sequences, lit in blues and cut to a jazz score by Serge Besset, are as good as anything in the form. It remains one of the most elegant small animated features of the century, and a corrective to the idea that the Oscar category exists only for studios.