I have been intrigued by this book since I read about it somewhere. I found this review today but I don’t think it was the one I read originally. It is a book which is heavily reliant on pictures so it seemed worth investigating for this project but when I ordered it for the library it had disappeared so I bought my own copy. My first surprise was how big it is A5 but more than 5cm deep.
The drawings were made in soft pencil then enlarged to “loosen them up” they are all in black and white to reflect the cinematic theme of the story which started with small frames and increases in size with each page until Hugo appears. (They also decrease in size at the end of the book) There are lots of drawings that replace passages of description. They often show part of a face or figure or zoom into a relevant area, over a few pages to lead the viewer through the story.
The drawings are mixed with film stills and drawings by the filmmaker Georges Méliès on whom one of the characters is based. They don’t share the page with the text which has its own pages and sometimes, for effect, doesn’t fill them. The effect is reminiscent of an old silent film where the text also has its own frame.
Is it a children's book? I like children's books so I’m not a very good judge here. It’s about a child and it’s a fairly simple story but some of the subject matter, about Georges Méliès, appears not to be aimed at children. The illustrations are very sophisticated for a children's book. Most picture books aimed at children use much more stylised images and often replace humans with animals or imaginary creatures. Maybe it’s aimed at someone reading to a child so that they are both entertained.
The story centres around an automaton machine. It was inspired by this machine in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Here is a video of it working and some information about other automatons plus a short interview with Brian Selznick.
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