Martin Scorsese is making his first 3D movie, and lucky for us, it’s a film the whole family will be able to enjoy. Scorsese isn’t usually a name that one associates with family filmmaking, but the famous auteur has turned his hand to a kid friendly storytelling with “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” The Sony distributed, GK Films-produced adaptation of Brian Selznick’s best selling books has been scheduled for release December 9th, 2011.
“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is the story of 12 year old Hugo, an orphan living in Paris in the 1930’s. Hugo lives in the walls of a train station where he strives to finish what his late father started and solve the mystery of a broken mechanical man. When his secret world is suddenly interrupted by an eccentric girl and the owner of a toy booth in the station, nothing will ever be the same.
The book’s primary inspiration is the life of turn-of-the-century pioneer filmmaker George Melies, who had a collection of life like wind-up figures called automata, and he worked in a toy booth in a Paris train station late in his life when he was struggling financially. Selznick even drew Melies’ real door in the book.
The 526 page book is told in words and pictures, as the Hugo Cabret Web site describes it, “it’s not quite a picture book, and it’s not really a graphic novel, a flip book, or a movie, but a combination of all these things. Each picture (there are nearly three hundred pages of pictures!) takes up an entire double page spread, and the story moves forward because you turn the pages to see the next moment unfold in front of you.” One can only imagine how that world will unfold under Martin Scorsese’s guiding eye and the lush new 3D technologies that have been filling movie theaters of late.
