It's an instantly engaging, cinematic form of story-telling, with dramatic close-ups to introduce all the protagonists. From here he has an aerial view of the station toyshop and the old man who runs it.Īfter 40 pages of these sequential drawings, there's a brief burst of text, another drawing, then more words. A boy approaches a railway station, He crosses the busy concourse, dodges through the crowds, up the stairs and along a deserted passage before slipping surreptitiously behind a secret panel in the wall and hiding himself behind the face of the station clock. After an opening sequence of a silvery moon on a black sky, we zoom down to earth, to Paris in the 1930s. The story starts in complete darkness, and as you turn the black-bordered pages, you feel you're watching an old black and white film. Open it and it's a multi-layered box of delights. Lying on the table stripped of its dust-jacket it is darkly seductive. Movie stills are interspersed with an avalanche of drawings in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a substantial volume with interlocking themes of secrecy, friendship and survival.
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