Hugo travels to the Oscars!

The film ‘Hugo’, which was released this year, went on to win a record 11 nominations for the Academy Awards. It eventually won 5 Oscars, tying with ‘The Artist’. Isn’t it a strange coincidence that both films that earned the most number of Oscars this year are about the history of cinema? 

It all began with another book. When well-known American illustrator Brian Selznick read a book called ‘Edison’s Eve’ by Gaby Wood, it got his creative juices flowing. Wood’s well-researched story about ‘automata’ began with a report on Thomas Edison’s attempt to make a wind-up doll that could talk. In today’s day of micro-chips and cheap talking-dolls, you probably want to laugh that the mega-brain who invented the incandescent lamp, wasted his time with a wind-up doll. But back in the late 1800s, the silicon chip hadn’t been invented.

Everything that moved on its own had to be wound up first, so clock-makers (or horologists) were considered the most high-tech dudes back then!

This book, about well-known automata that survived in museums, had an entire chapter on George Melies, a French film-maker who’d made the first science fiction movie called  ‘A Trip to the Moon’ in 1902. He also had a collection of wind-up ‘dolls’ made by a famous French magician called Houdini. A bulb went off in Brian Selznick’s brain. He remembered seeing Melies’ film when he was a kid. He decided he wanted to write a story about George Melies, his collection of automata and the history of film, before Hollywood. And he did. By January 2007, he’d completed ‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’.

Meeting Hugo

Hugo is a young orphan. His mother died when he was an infant, but his loving father, who was a clock-maker, looked after Hugo well – even teaching him all that he knew about horology. When Hugo’s father dies in an accidental fire at the museum he worked in, Hugo is taken in by his drunk uncle, who is in charge of winding up the clocks at Paris’ central railway station.

Soon Hugo’s uncle disappears. Petrified that he’ll be turned out of the room he lives in, deep in the bowels of the station, Hugo meticulously winds all the clocks, hoping the authorities won’t realise his uncle is missing. But apart from this boring job, Hugo is fired by a dream — to somehow make the wind-up ‘writing man’, that he salvaged from the charred ruins of the burned down museum, work. Since his father too had been trying to repair the automata before his death, poor Hugo decides that whatever the ‘writing man’ eventually does write, is bound to be a message from his dead father. 

So in pursuit of his dream, Hugo takes to stealing little wind-up toys from the toy shop in the station, recycling their parts into the insides of the ‘writing man’. He gets caught, of course. But do read about how he befriends Isabelle, the shop owner’s ‘niece’, the shock he receives when he realises who the owner really is and the mysteries that both Isabelle and he unravel when they finally get the wind-up ‘writing man’ to pen down his message.

This is a fat, fat book but 284 pages of it are beautiful black and white illustrations. It’s a haunting story of a talented, lonely boy, finding a family that appreciates him. It’s also about the history of cinema; about Paris at the turn of the century; and a reminder that though we all think that Hollywood is the Mecca of film…it all started in France! 

It was the French Lumiere brothers who invented the ‘cinematograph’ — the first projector throwing moving pictures onto a screen for an audience to watch. Till then, you could only watch a ‘movie’ by peering into the peep-hole of a ‘kinetoscope’ which allowed you to see the film on a 2-inch wide screen…one person at a time.  

‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’ went on to win the Caldecott Medal that year (the first novel to win it; it’s usually awarded to illustrated books only). And by 2008, Martin Scorsese had bought the movie rights. The film ‘Hugo’, which was released this year, went on to win a record 11 nominations for the Academy Awards. And eventually won 5 Oscars, tying with ‘The Artist’. Isn’t it a strange coincidence that both films that earned the most number of Oscars this year are about the history of cinema?

Now the book is the most gorgeous thing to own. Unfortunately, it’s rather expensive. I haven’t seen it in too many shops, but you could order it at your favourite book shop or online. Is your school the kind that asks kids to suggest books that could be bought? If it is, put this book on the list…that way, many of you can get to read it without shelling out the Rs 800+ that it costs. Otherwise, watch ‘Hugo’ the movie!