'Yet everything is enhanced,' says Selznick, in his only interview with a British newspaper ahead of the Oscars. Most strikingly, Scorsese's film is – for all its state-of-the-art 3D and its director's masterful eye – closer to, and more respectful of, the work on paper than any adaptation that comes to mind. It is a homage not only to silent cinema and Méliès but to Selznick's book. Scorsese's first excursion into what the Americans call 'family cinema' is the adventure of a lone child in a tradition as established as Oliver Twist. The result is a doorstopper book that has sold more than a million copies, and a piece of alchemic magic on screen. In reality, Méliès, a former conjurer and magician, did the same: he was rediscovered working in a Montparnasse toyshop, and his films were restored as iconic treasures of silent cinema.

The automaton circuitously reveals the old man as the great film director Georges Méliès, who has, in despair, destroyed almost all trace of his work after the ravages of the first world war.

Hugo's attempts to repair the machine bring him to another orphan, Isabelle, who lives in the care of an old man who keeps the station's toyshop, from whom Hugo steals mechanical parts for his enterprise. The boy's great love and purpose is a mysterious automaton, the only legacy of his father, who was killed in a museum fire. The story is that of an orphaned boy who lives in the hidden chambers of Montparnasse station in the early 1930s, where he keeps the clocks working. (Which is all the more extraordinary for the fact that the book was published in 2007, long before the film The Artist was made – also a tribute to silent film – against which Hugo is pitched almost head-to-head at the Oscars.) And secondly because the book is in part about film: the wonder and magic of silent movies in general, and the work of that genius of early French cinema Georges Méliès in particular. Firstly, because the book is the inspiration for Martin Scorsese's magnificent film Hugo, which is up for 11 Academy Awards in a fortnight's time. This opening sequence from the best-selling book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by the American children's illustrator and author Brian Selznick, runs like a movie reel as you turn those pages – which is fitting for a number of reasons. Turn again, and we see, close-up, his arm reach towards an ornate iron grate in the wall and then – in the graphic equivalent of a cinema zoom-shot – we see his boot, with holes in the sole, disappearing into a duct, and the station's concealed innards and passages. Turn the page, and he enters the mouth of a square tunnel, into the shadows he pauses, against the tunnel wall, to ensure he is unobserved. The boy – wearing a tatty frock coat and waistcoat – runs across a station forecourt, through iron columns, steam and glass.

Hugo cabret automaton drawing