Paris in the 1930's, a thief, a broken machine, a strange girl, a mean old man, and the secrets that tie them all together. So every time you see Méliès in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the person you are really looking at is my dear friend Remy Charlip, who continues to inspire everyone who has the great pleasure of knowing him or seeing his work. I excitedly asked him to pose as the character in my book, and fortunately, he said yes. Last December he was asking me what I was working on, and as I was describing this book to him, I realized that Remy looks exactly like Georges Méliès. At that moment, Hugo Cabret was born.Ī few years ago, I had the honor of meeting Remy Charlip, and I'm proud to say that we've become friends. Instantly, I imagined a boy discovering these broken, rusty machines in the garbage, stealing one and attempting to fix it. I discovered that Méliès had a collection of mechanical, wind-up figures (called automata) that were donated to a museum, but which were later destroyed and thrown away. But it wasn’t until I read a book called Edison's Eve: The Quest for Mechanical Life by Gaby Woods that my story began to come into focus. I began thinking about this book ten years ago after seeing some of the magical films of Georges Méliès, the father of science-fiction movies. I've used the lessons I learned from Remy Charlip and other masters of the picture book to create something that is not a exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things. But unlike most novels, the images in my new book don't just illustrate the story they help tell it. My new book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is a 550 page novel in words and pictures. Now that I’m an illustrator myself, I’ve often thought about this dramatic storytelling device and all of its creative possibilities. Each turn reveals something new in a way that builds on the image on the previous page. Fortunately and Thirteen fascinated me in part because, in both books, the very act of turning the pages plays a pivotal role in telling the story. When I was a kid, two of my favorite books were by an amazing man named Remy Charlip. A cryptic drawing, a treasured notebook, a stolen key, a mechanical man, and a hidden message from Hugo's dead father form the backbone of this intricate, tender, and spellbinding mystery. But when his world suddenly interlocks with an eccentric, bookish girl and a bitter old man who runs a toy booth in the station, Hugo's undercover life, and his most precious secret, are put in jeopardy. Orphan, clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity.
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