Revealing new preview of the movie Hugo

I am quite excited about this film due to be released in theaters on November 23rd, 2011. The movie titled, Hugo, is based on the excellent book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.If you've read any of my earlier posts on the the book, you'll know that an automaton inspired by Maillardet's drawing automaton is a central part of the story. I posted about the first trailer for Hugo back in July. This new trailer shows more glimpses of the automaton as a well as more about Ben Kingsley's role as the real magician and film pioneer he plays, Georges Méliès. After the death of the great magician and automaton-maker Robert-Houdin, it was Méliès who purchased his theater and acquired about ten of Robert-Houdin's autoamta. While he didn't have any of the writing automata created by Robert-Houdin or that of Maillardet, he was an accomplished mechanician and thoroughly fascinating character in his own right.

This promises to be an amazing movie and I simply cannot wait for its release. If you are impatient as I am and have not yet read the book, the story is about a young boy who lives in the walls of a Paris train station. A bit of the book's description sums it up nicely: "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." I highly recommend it (for children and automata-obsessed adults alike). It is a delightful mixture of text and images, fact and fiction, history and fantasy. I read it myself and have to agree with the high ratings that amazon buyers have given it -- 4.5 of 5 starts.

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Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life

I long while ago, I did a short post on the book Edison's Eve by Gaby wood. I didn't say much about it, other than it was a good book. Having reread it recently, I wanted to a say a bit more. You can expect a full review in the coming months.

The book is framed around a central question: what is it that makes us human and how do representations of humans in some animated form challenge us to return to that question again and again. Against the backdrop of this framework, Wood examines five historical subjects. Some of these deal quite specifically with automata. The chapters cover the following subjects:

1 - The Frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson and the several famous automata he created in the the 18th-century

2 - Wolfgang von Kempelen's chess-playing machine, the Turk, who beat fine chess players on several continents for decades. There is plenty of interesting stuff on Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in this chapter too.

3 - Thomas Edison's attempt to enter the toy market by incorporating his newly-developed phonograph into the body of a doll.

4 - The ground-breaking early special-effects films of Georges Méliès.

5 - The Doll family who toured with Ringling Brothers and appeared in The Wizard of Oz.

The book is very well written and the product of extensive research. I tended to prefer the chapters that dealt specifically with automata, but they are all connected in some way -- sometimes loosely and sometimes tightly. Overall, it's an educational and enjoyable read.

Here is where you can order Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life in paperback. The hardcover version is out-of-print, but easily obtained used for a similar price.

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