The Invention of Hugo Cabret — Updated

I am look­ing for­ward to see­ing the new Scors­ese film “Hugo”.  When I read the book,  “The Inven­tion of Hugo Cabret” to my son, years ago, I quickly rec­og­nized the role played by George Melies in the story. If you are in ani­ma­tion, and you don’t know who George Melies was, you need to. He was the orig­i­nal spe­cial effects film­maker. You prob­a­bly know this image.

UPDATE: I had some free time, so I re-watched my dvd of “Melies The Magi­cian” (which is appar­ently out of print).  I learned how the “automata” ele­ment, the windup robotic fig­ure,  found it’s way into the Hugo story.  George Melies, dur­ing his stage magic years, had pur­chased the Robert Houdin The­ater.  Robert Houdin, was the first stage magi­cian to cre­ate shows purely for enter­tain­ment pur­poses, rather than insist­ing super­nat­ural forces were truly at work.  (The later, and more famous, magi­cian Hou­dini took his name from Robert Houdin)  Houdin had skills as a clock­maker, and part of the the­ater included com­plex automata, ani­mated fig­ures that would act out sim­ple motions.   Some automata were sim­i­lar to what you might see in a depart­ment store win­dow, but some where extra­or­di­nar­ily com­plex and could actu­ally write and draw.  Here is a video with examples.

There are a bunch of edu­ca­tional links avail­able at the Hugo Cabret web­site.

More links about Melies are avail­able here and here and here.

For those who just want an easy intro­duc­tion, here is a short video: