![]() And that’s not the end of Hugo’s troubles: A station inspector named Gustav is determined to sic his Doberman pinscher Maximilian on every thieving, parentless urchin he can sniff out, then ship them off to an orphanage.īut Hugo finds an ally in the shop owner’s goddaughter, Isabelle, a wide-eyed, wonder-filled girl longing for an adventure like the ones she’s read about her whole life. ![]() Soon the old shop owner is onto him, though, catching him red-handed. So when he’s not winding clocks and cribbing croissants to survive, Hugo steals toys from a shop in the train station and uses their gears to try to restore the automaton to “life.” A message of hope that would help him make sense of his solitary existence.Įxcept that the automaton is broken. Hugo’s convinced that the automaton might, somehow, give him a message from his father. Wind it up, put an ink pen in its hand, and it’ll write … something. ![]() It would be a hopeless existence but for one important legacy his father left behind-an impossibly intricate, robot-like automaton salvaged from a museum. ![]() Taken in and then quickly abandoned by his dissolute Uncle Claude (the caretaker of all the clocks in the depot), Hugo now tends to winding the station’s clocks while peering longingly through their faces at the bustling world beyond. But when his dad is killed in an explosive accident, all the love and security the boy has ever known goes up in flames. Once upon a time, Hugo enjoyed the loving care of his attentive father, a clockmaker and museum curator. That’s because this young orphan’s home is the most unlikely of places: deep in the heart of Paris’ bustling train station in the 1930s. And he lives there alone … except for the fact that he’s actually never alone. It’s a dank world of gears and steam and coal and levers and shadowy passageways that few even know exist. I imagined a boy finding one of those broken machines in the garbage and at that moment Hugo Cabret was born.Hugo Cabret lives in a secret world. So he donated them to a museum, but unfortunately the museum didn’t take care of them and they were destroyed and thrown away. Méliès loved these automata, but he lost his money and couldn’t take care of them any more. The mechanical figures had been built years earlier by a magician and clockmaker named Jean-Robert Houdin (the magician who Harry Houdini named himself after). Gaby Wood had an entire chapter about Georges Méliès in her book because Méliès owned a collection of automata. Automata are mechanical figures which are made out of very complicated clockworks and can do amazing things like sing or dance or swing on a trapeze or write poems or even (supposedly) play chess. This book is about the history of automata (it’s pronounced aw-TOM-ah-tah). One of my main inspirations for The Invention of Hugo Cabret was a book called Edison’s Eve: A Magical Quest for Mechanical Life by an author named Gaby Wood. Click here to read a fascinating essay Andy wrote about his experience working on the automaton.Īnd click here to visit the Franklin Institute's web page about the automaton.Ĭlick here to see a website with other automata and lots of amazing mechanical wonders.Īnd click here to visit a website where you can make your own simple automata out of paper. The photo to the right shows Andy Baron fixing the automaton in 2007. But luckily, my friend Andy Baron, a mechanical genius, said he could fix the machine, and he did!. I had to go down to the storage area in the basement to see it. Unfortunately, the machine was broken when I first encountered it, and it was not on display. I went to Philadelphia to visit the machine, and I found out that it had a pretty amazing history that was very similar to the story I had made up for the automaton in The Invention of Hugo Cabret. This is not one of the machines that Georges Melies owned (see below), but it was very much LIKE the ones he had. While I was researching The Invention of Hugo Cabret, I discovered that the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia owned a very old automaton (pronounced aw-TOM-ah-tahn).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |