Book published: 2007: Movie released: 2020
We are now starting a new series, books to movies adaptations!
The first book to make as a movie in our series is The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Evoking graphic novels, picture books, flip books, and films, The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick is utterly brilliant. It’s a thick hardback—mostly full of pencil sketches—that tells a truly magical story of a boy in 1930s Paris, an automaton built by his dad, and a secret from the early days of cinema. In 2011, Martin Scorsese released Hugo, an adaptation starring Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sacha Baron Cohen, Emily Mortimer, and Jude Law. Though Selznick’s novel was written for children, adults adore both the book and the film, aw1 r 314arding the former a 2008 Caldecott Medal and nominating the latter for a 2012 Best Picture Acatdemy Award.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a children’s historical fiction book written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. It was published by Scholastic. It takes place in France as a young boy finds his purpose. The hardcover edition was released on January 30, 2007, and the paperback edition was released on June 2, 2008. With 284 pictures between the book’s 533 pages, the book depends as much on its pictures as it does on the words. Selznick himself has described the book as “not 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”. The book won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, the first novel to do so, as the Caldecott Medal is for picture books, and was adapted by Martin Scorsese as the 2011 film Hugo.
So writing a book not just reaches the book readers, it may also reach the movie lovers. One of the other example is our previous post about the author Joanne Rowling and her most popular Harry Potter which created a remarkable history in book to movie adaptations. (Check that blog too: Part 1: https://sgshpublications.com/the-great-harry-potter-and-joanne-rowling/
Part 2: https://sgshpublications.com/part-2-harry-potter-the-making/)
Do you know that the first recorded film based on literature was the 1899 movie Cinderella, directed by French director Georges Méliès in 1899. The film was adapted from the original Cinderella text written by French author Charles Perrault and was the first ever film adaptation of the classic tale.
Followed by that 338 books are made into the history of books to movie adaptations. This is a quiet new pathway for all the book writers. Adapting material previously published in another genre is not something that the film industry invented. Classical Greek playwrights adapted myths that had been passed on through an oral tradition; Shakespeare appropriated materials for his plays from various sources. And as soon as the makers of cinema recognized that telling a good story in moving pictures required a “good story,” adaptations of novels, plays, and short stories became commonplace. Shortly thereafter, critics began to analyze these adaptations, and various schools of thought developed.
George Bluestone, whose 1957 study, Novels into Film has long been recognized as the basis for much film adaptation study, separates the experience of reading and watching as passive and active endeavors, clearly favoring the active: “We observe that the word symbols in written language must be translated into images of things, feelings and concepts through the process of thought. Where the moving picture comes to us directly through perception, language must be fulfilled through the screen of conceptual apprehension” (qtd. in Peary 3). As the history of film adaptation criticism has evolved, many critics have taken a view that they are condescending from the act of reading to the act of watching a film, to them a “lesser” art form.
