Many of Martin Scorsese’s movies, such as Goodfellas and Taxi Driver would be deemed inappropriate for a younger audience. In an Oscar interview Scorsese said he wanted to make a movie his daughter, Francesca Scorsese, could watch. Hence, he directed the movie Hugo, based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. The movie garnered five Academy Awards in 2012.
Hugo, set in the early 1930s, is about a twelve-year-old boy, the son of a deceased watchmaker, who lives in the walls of a train station in Paris, France, maintaining the station’s clocks and struggling to repair an automaton rescued from a museum attic by Hugo’s father. WHEW!
I liked the movie. The acting and dialog was good. The cinematography was brilliant; colorful and fantasy-like. But the star of the movie for me was the automaton; a machine that looked like the bust of a young boy that drew pictures. It fascinated me because the automaton was driven by a series of cams; obviously, being the 1930s, there were no electronics available to drive the unit.
I don’t know where I’ve been but I had never heard of automatons. They are machines that perform a specific task based on a set of coded instructions and they’ve been around for centuries. The closest I may have come to an automaton might be the parks of Disney World in attractions such as The Hall of Presidents, Pirates of the Caribbean® and Country Bear Jamboree.
Automatons, or the plans for automatons, have been around for centuries. According to the World’s Strangest website Leonardo da Vinci created plans for an automaton in the 1400s but there wasn’t any proof that he had ever built the machine. At some point after 1950, someone built an automaton based on da Vinci's design and it produced a number of a humanoid movements.
The Franklin Institute reports that the automaton in Hugo was based on Henri Maillardet's automaton. The real Maillardet automaton was severely damaged and required a massive effort to rebuild it. In the movie, Hugo doesn’t know the origins of the automaton until he rebuilds the machine and it signs the name of its creator at the end of its drawing program. In reality, the origin of the Maillardet automaton was doubted until it wrote, “written by the automaton of Maillardet.”
Hugo, set in the early 1930s, is about a twelve-year-old boy, the son of a deceased watchmaker, who lives in the walls of a train station in Paris, France, maintaining the station’s clocks and struggling to repair an automaton rescued from a museum attic by Hugo’s father. WHEW!
I liked the movie. The acting and dialog was good. The cinematography was brilliant; colorful and fantasy-like. But the star of the movie for me was the automaton; a machine that looked like the bust of a young boy that drew pictures. It fascinated me because the automaton was driven by a series of cams; obviously, being the 1930s, there were no electronics available to drive the unit.
I don’t know where I’ve been but I had never heard of automatons. They are machines that perform a specific task based on a set of coded instructions and they’ve been around for centuries. The closest I may have come to an automaton might be the parks of Disney World in attractions such as The Hall of Presidents, Pirates of the Caribbean® and Country Bear Jamboree.
Automatons, or the plans for automatons, have been around for centuries. According to the World’s Strangest website Leonardo da Vinci created plans for an automaton in the 1400s but there wasn’t any proof that he had ever built the machine. At some point after 1950, someone built an automaton based on da Vinci's design and it produced a number of a humanoid movements.
The Franklin Institute reports that the automaton in Hugo was based on Henri Maillardet's automaton. The real Maillardet automaton was severely damaged and required a massive effort to rebuild it. In the movie, Hugo doesn’t know the origins of the automaton until he rebuilds the machine and it signs the name of its creator at the end of its drawing program. In reality, the origin of the Maillardet automaton was doubted until it wrote, “written by the automaton of Maillardet.”
I just think it’s cool. In 2012 we make robots that perform a variety of tasks and it seems commonplace. Yet, inventors have been creating these things for hundreds of years. Maillardet was born in 1745 and according to the Online Enyclopedia, Maillardet’s automaton, built in 1805, was believed to have “. . . the largest cam-based memory of any automaton of the era.”
More than 200 years ago an inventor created a device capable of producing these amazing drawings. I’m continually blown away by the creative genius of humans. The mind, the thought process, required to develop this piece of technology boggles my mind.
What do you think; is my awe misplaced?
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