You can discover a lot about a fantasy world from its mode of entry: an English wardrobe, a disappearing train platform, a rabbit hole. The means to the phantasmagorical dream world of “Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds,” available on demand, is as playful and fanciful as the destination: You have to hopscotch there.

“Sirocco” begins with two sisters, Juliette and Carmen, getting dropped off at a family friend’s house for the weekend. This friend, Agnès, is the author of a popular fantasy book series about an ill-tempered wizard named Sirocco who summons devastating winds to destroy whole towns. When Agnès is distracted, a sentient toy — a testy little fellow with magical powers and a treasure trove of absurd lines — hopscotches the sisters into the kingdom of winds, where they’re transformed into cats. That’s not the end of their problems: Carmen’s at risk of getting married against her will, and Juliette is offered as a pet to Selma, an elegant avian adventurer turned opera singer. With the help of Selma, the two sisters set out to find Sirocco to figure out a way to get back home.

Directed by Benoît Chieux, who wrote the screenplay with Alain Gagnol, “Sirocco” feels drawn from the same extended family of stories as those from the great Hayao Miyazaki — contemporary fairy tales that skip genre cliches and conventions to provide novel plots where the next step in the journey is always a mystery.

The intrigues of this film begin with the animation, which recalls such psychedelic classics as “Yellow Submarine” and “Son of the White Mare.” A town of amphibious residents live in gravity-defying skyscrapers made by Jenga-stacked geometric blocks. Selma travels in a flying opera house kept afloat by a hot air balloon resembling a jellyfish. And in the sky, clouds churn and move like sentient gobs of putty. The various landscapes of this fantastical world are also marked with expressive coloring-book palettes: The cherry reds and watermelon pinks of a town’s architecture and cliffs are starkly contrasted with the honey and amber browns of desert sands.

Most arresting, however, is the film’s use of sound and music (sound design by Gurwal Coïc-Gallas and composition by Pablo Pico), which give each scene an atmospheric lilt, whether it’s the otherworldly murmurs the girls hear while flying through the skies or the evanescent crooning of Selma (in an unforgettable performance by jazz singer Célia Kameni, whose wordless, ethereal vocals recall the charging and receding movement of winds).

The film’s many whimsies don’t detract from the resonant themes at the fable’s core, about the transformative qualities of grief and the indelible bond between sisters, but this short and sweet 80-minute fantasy does in many ways feel incomplete. “Sirocco” ends with a few unresolved fates and the promise of more adventures to come; this is only one chapter in the story. Now, what about the rest?