[4] During the Belle Époque, the little mixed race girl Dilili was part of a Kanak village set up in a Parisian public garden.

Very quickly, Dilili is intrigued by the announcements from newspaper sellers: little girls are regularly kidnapped by a network of bandits who sign their crimes under the name “Male-Masters”.

Dilili meets Colette there, then the painter and poster artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who helps them spot two Male Masters.

By eavesdropping on their conversation, Dilili learns that they are preparing to rob a jewelry store using equipment that one of the bandits will collect "at the gates of hell" .

When they arrive in the garden where the “door to hell” is located, the bandit is already there and Orel pursues him without success: as soon as he steps out into the street, the Male Master inexplicably disappears.

An admiring witness, who turns out to be the Prince of Wales passing through Paris, supports Dilili in the face of an unfriendly police officer.

Their leader, the Grand Male Master, dressed in a plum-colored tunic, is convinced that women risk taking power and he seeks to enslave them.

In the den of the Male Masters, the kidnapped little girls are educated to be nothing but“four-legged” , who are dressed in black, walk on all fours and are slaves to men to the point of serving them as seats.

It was the engineer Alberto Santos-Dumont who designed the plan for the balloon, but its large dimensions and the urgency of the situation were such that Sarah Bernhardt called on the German baron Ferdinand von Zeppelin to manufacture it.

The airship then reaches the Eiffel Tower and the Champ de Mars, where Emma Calvé sings a divine tune in honor of the little girls and Dilili.

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)[5] are defined with a tracing effect developed from that used in Kirikou and the Men and Women.

[6] 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.