LOS ANGELES — It's almost unbelievable that "Trembled Blossoms," the four-minute animated film that has taken on a life of its own on the Prada Web site and arty comic sites, has its roots in a tiny piece of decoration — an art nouveau-themed flower-and-nymph drawing that Los Angeles illustrator James Jean did for the wall of a store. Miuccia Prada was so taken with the piece that it informed her runway collection — the lolling organza dirndl skirts with Jean's tendrily drawings, the romantic flared pajama pants and tunic tops with petal-shaped collars, the painted tulip heels — and the entire spring fashion season. Then came the idea to produce an animated short based on the illustration, which is another L.A. story.

In the erotically charged film, a hummingbird punctures the center of a flower. A nymph emerges from the blanket of winter to begin her journey through a lush forest. Then, out of this dreamy, Dali-esque imagery comes something totally commercial — a pair of crabs morph into those tulip-heeled shoes, a fish transforms into a striped handbag, and the blank canvas of the nymph's body is covered in a sinuous dress.

The film has received more than 200,000 hits on the Prada Web site since it was released last month and has been posted on YouTube and art blogs, crossing the worlds of film, fashion and fine arts.

True to the designer's outsider spirit, there is much about the film that is unconventional, including the four-minute format and the relaxed pace, a breath of fresh air in the age of quick cuts. The film combines cutting-edge motion capture technology with classic animation, achieving a dreamlike quality that recalls "Destino," the unfinished animated short Salvador Dali made for Disney in the 1940s, which recently was completed and shown at the Dali exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

"Trembled Blossoms" was released first on the Internet and later was transferred to film stock to be shown at parties at the Prada epicenters in New York, Beverly Hills, and next month in Tokyo.

The film, directed by Pasadena Arts Center graduate James Lima, was produced in Los Angeles. But it had its origins at the Soho store. Early last year, design company and frequent Prada collaborator 2x4 commissioned Jean to create an illustration for wallpaper there, based on the idea of a graphic novel.

"We wanted to do some comics and thought we would do something noir, but it was too violent," Prada told me in Paris last month.

She rejected his first submission, asking for something more fantasy-like. Jean obliged. The designer liked the nymph and flower landscape so much, she wanted to use it in her collection.

"Journalists are getting more and more difficult," Prada said, commenting on the demand for blockbuster runway collections. "They want to be entertained. You have to tell a story."

After the September runway show was a hit, Prada got back in touch with Jean and asked him to draft a treatment for a short film based on his drawings. She hired a producer, Max Brun, who turned to Lima to direct.

Lima is a conceptual artist and special-effects supervisor for film who has worked on big-budget projects with Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and others, as well as on commercials. Strangely, he never met Prada (they communicated through others and via e-mail) but says he found her ideas appealing, because they were so anti-Hollywood.

"I assumed we were looking at 30 seconds or one minute of animation, because I have been conditioned to accept that format, based on radio from 70 years ago," he said over breakfast in Beverly Hills recently. "But this was four minutes, and it couldn't be any more or any less."

Prada wanted to use motion-capture technology to create three-dimensional space, but without being imprisoned by photo realism. She asked the animators to tweak the nymph, making her move like a runway model and gesture grandly like a Disney character.

"The film is real and fake, and that is one of my obsessions in my work at the moment," the designer said. "In photographs, there is so much retouching, reality doesn't exist anymore. Perhaps it only exists for people on film."

Lima completed the film in two months last winter. "It is a commercial, but it doesn't put the brand in people's faces," he says.

And yet, you can't open a fashion magazine without seeing Jean's ink drawings in advertisements and editorials. The first shipment of the $2,290 fairy bags sold out in days. More than anything before it, this collection has blurred the lines between art and fashion. Some might argue it's confused them.

"They are two separate fields," Prada maintained. "But creativity is in demand, because people are bored of everything. They want excitement."