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Rating: I'm certainly not the first to discover that almost always, since the times of Pinocchio, children's books are not always what they seem.
In my opinion, this book by Brian Selznick is no exception, with the added aspect that it is almost entirely molded from the material of dreams, which, as everyone knows, always conceal something indecipherable.
Selznick's book (truly splendid in its graphic design) is written in the form of a daydream of Georges Méliès, that is, the man who, according to the history of Cinema, was the inventor of the fantasy genre.
About the Méliès of 1931, now disillusioned and forgotten, as his biography tells, and forced to live by managing a toy booth in a Paris station.
I would like to emphasize, for those who have read the book, that this interpretation is confirmed by the image of the clock on the wall preceded by the image of its hands in the eye of the old man (where, if not in the eyes, are people's dreams seen?).
In the dream, Méliès imagines a young boy (Hugo Chabret) who finds one of his mechanical automata in a museum, brings it back to life, becomes passionate about his art, and ends up, dressing as what was Méliès' alter ego in his films, namely Prof. Alcofrisbas, building an automaton capable of writing an entire book that narrates and "stages" (as in a film) his (Méliès') own dream.
In the end, as in a magic trick, it is revealed that the "dreamt" book is exactly the book we are reading (this greatly reminds me of the strange loops of Douglas Hofstadter).
Is that all (and do you think that's little)?
I wouldn't say so.
Think about it for a moment.
The fact that we have the book in our hands means several things:
1) That the book is in a certain sense the work of Méliès.
2) That precisely it was written by one of the characters of his films who came to life in the real world in the form of one of his (Méliès') mechanical automata (found who knows where, who knows when, by someone, probably by Selznick himself ...).
3) That it might also be that we, holding the book in our hands, are fictional characters in the world "dreamed" by an illusionist. All this in a branching of time, parallel to the "original" one, into which the magician himself has brought us.
4) Alternatively, we are in the "real" world, but we ourselves could also be puppets/automata, like the person who wrote the book.
In short, a pantheistic/idealistic/gnostic dream/nightmare not exactly for children.
But perhaps, as Rabelais did before him, Méliès/Selznick simply wanted to play around with those, like me, who have always sought to find esoteric messages in works of art.
Aloha
PS. Honestly, I had and still intend to go watch Scorsese's movie at the cinema with my daughter. But I really hope that Scorsese hasn't seen what I saw in it, or at least that my daughter doesn't see it.
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