On November 23, Martin Scorsese’s most recent film, Hugo, opened to much critical acclaim. Hugo and Scorsese have already garnered rave reviews from critics at Time, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and others, with many noting the film’s magical feel, stunning visuals, and Scorsese’s masterful use of stereoscopic imaging, or 3D. The media, however, has made very little mention of the movie’s origins in the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.
Obviously Hugo is not the first film to begin as a novel, but to call The Invention of Hugo Cabret just a novel is a discredit to both the book and Selznick. The book is 533 pages, 284 of which are illustrations that tell the story themselves, rather than simply complimenting the text. The headline of the original New York Times review of Selznick’s book, which ran in January 2008, is “Reads Like A Book, Looks Like A Film”. This novel was long on its way to becoming a movie before the screen rights were even purchased.
In a world where movies are revered and 3D is the emerging king of visual media, Selznick’s substantial artistic contribution to the film has been overlooked. Scorsese snapped up the screen rights to The Invention of Hugo Cabret when the book was first released in 2007, before it won the 2008 Caldecott Medal or spent 42 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list for children’s chapter books.
Not only does Selznick’s novel come complete with 284 illustrations, the novel, a work of historical fiction, also deals heavily with the life and work of Georges Méliès, a prolific French filmmaker in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Scorsese, in recreating scenes from Méliès’s films, had 100 years of innovation on his side, including computer generated imaging, digital technology, and, of course, 3D imaging. Part of what made Méliès’s films so magical was their innovation; Méliès was one of the first filmmakers to use time-lapse photography, multiple exposures, and hand-painted color. Méliès also invented 
the “stop trick,” where an object seems to vanish into thin air by stopping the film, removing the object, and then resuming filming. His work in film was an extension of his work as a magician. Selznick, too, was a pioneer, and his novel was the first to win a Caldecott Medal, since the Caldecott awards exceptional illustration and The Invention of Hugo Cabret was innovative in its use of illustration in such a lengthy story.
Today, critics are satisfied that Scorsese has entered into the realm of 3D. Hugo is visually stunning, but so were Avatar and The Polar Express. If Scorsese’s film adaptation of the novel wins an Oscar, which seems likely considering the excellent reviews and Scorsese’s reputation, will anyone care how much of the movie’s critically acclaimed aesthetics come from previous visual media? More likely, the media and the movie’s collaborators will continue to look the other way as Méliès and Selznick’s contributions go unmentioned so that Scorsese and his crew can continue their cinematographic heroism and 3D remains the king of artistic accomplishment.
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