The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Categories: Graphic Novels , Science Fiction & Fantasy , Children's Books
Now that we have a new category, Children’s Books, on our blog, I want to post about an enchantingly different book that adults as well as kids will enjoy. It’s already getting plenty of praise, and you may have to wait in line for a copy, but I promise you it is worth the wait. This thick block of a book looks like something you’d use for a doorstop, but open it up and suddenly you’re transported beyond the clouds.
It's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, a story told alternately in words and page upon page of black and white sketches. With the magical, herky-jerky stutter of early film scenes, these stop-motion, cinematic pictures tell a dreamlike story of an orphaned boy, a famous filmmaker, and the fantastic machines and still more fantastic visions that draw them together.
Hugo lives in the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s, where he carries on his dead father’s job of maintaining the clocks, filching what he needs to survive from the station shops. He is lured out of his hiding by the mechanical clockwork toys at a toy stall run by a cantankerous old man. In his secret room in the back corridors of the station, Hugo is using stolen bits and pieces from those toys to help rebuild the automaton he retrieved from the museum fire that killed his father. Unfortunately, he is caught by the toymaker.
His meeting with this toymaker, the toymaker’s feisty goddaughter, and a young camera buff involve Hugo (and the automaton) in an adventure that the wary boy could never have dreamed of.
This isn’t exactly a graphic novel, but its pages of urgent, close-up sketches are almost like a silent, black and white movie, even more immediately cinematic than most graphic novels. They spool the story along at top speed as you turn the pages, waiting to find out what happens to Hugo.
The book is based on the author’s fascination with early French fantasy-filmmaker George Melies. Even if you know nothing about Melies, you’ll remember the famous image from the 1902 silent A Trip to the Moon, in which a rocketship strikes the eye of the man in the moon—an image that plays a part in Hugo’s story.
