The movie starts with Hugo Cabret, a
boy who lives and works in the walls in the train station to wind the clocks after
his father death. He started to steal some parts for his automaton from the toy
shop. He was caught by the toy shop owner, papa Georges (Georges Méliès) and surrendered
his notebook so that he wouldn’t get caught by the station inspector. In order
to gain his notebook back he started to work at the toyshop. Isabelle, a girl
that loves adventures, who is also the goddaughter of Georges Méliès tries to
become friend with Hugo and get to know more about the automaton and movies. They
then discovered about the message from the automaton and the mysteries behind Georges
Méliès’ “death”.
Hugo
is a very beautiful film. The whole film is an art. The settings are very
artistic. The art sense can be seen everywhere, at the beginning of the film
where they show the city of Paris using establishing shot, the clocks’ parts, the buildings. The trademark
of the city, Eiffel Tower and The Arc de Triomphe were shown in the film to
indicate the beauty of the city. When Hugo is upset and recalled his past
together with his father, he will look out to the window and have a look at the
beautiful city, as he will forgets the sadness beneath his heart. One of the
cuts from the scene where the spinning gear of the clock is blended to the
running cars around the Eiffel Tower is perfectly matched. The details in the
mechanism, either the clocks or the automaton are designed very beautifully,
which are appealing to the audiences.
Rather than just the settings, the
relationships between the people represented the society of France, the country
of romance. Love is budding everywhere in the film. Even the dogs were also in
love as the characters named Monsieur Frick and Madame Emilie put them together
so that they both can also be together. The station inspector likes the florist
in the train station, he feel so shy and awkward to greet her. It was Madame
Emilie who encourages him to do so. They actually get together as well in the
end when Hugo’s case is closed. Music and dances are parts of romance. Lovely
music is played in the train station and Isabelle is dancing with the girls, which
attracted Hugo in a glance. Papa Georges and Mama Jeanne are caring for each
other, started from the old days when they were making films together. Papa
Georges even praised that his wife is still pretty like when she was young.
The movie shows how a film has ever
been made in the past, how George Méliès realized filming a movie can tell a
story and how he experiment them. When he discovered how a movie is made by
using cameras, he got rejected to buy one from Lumière brothers so he built
them. Although at the beginning his
films were not about telling story but to capture motion pictures. “They wanted
to show objects and people in motion.”(Gaureadault, 1987) As a part of historical
film, Hugo is different, the author
of the book and the director tells the history of film and the story of Georges
Méliès in a different way. Historical film is often told in documentary but Hugo is told in a story that filled with
love, adventures, family and trust that would wow people. The film uses Hugo
and Isabelle as the third person perspective to discover who is George Méliès
and what he have done to the society and the reasons he stopped doing it.
To study about film, it is important
to know about the mechanism and the history behind a film. The movie tells about
how Georges Méliès made them. His movies are masterpieces as he invented the editing
skills by cutting the negatives and join them back with glue because there was
no editing software and computers in the past. “As a schoolboy, Méliès recalled
being possessed by the "demon of drawing," an "artistic
passion" that distracted him from his studies of the written word.”(Solomon,
2012) He played tricks in his films, he designed them throughout his
imagination and brought them to real life.
As a conclusion, it is important to study
about the great filmmaker of all time, Georges Méliès before knowing how to produce
any. The ideas from Méliès were very creative and making a movie was a dream
come true in the old days and the dream shall go on.
