We're dying to see Martin Scorsese's first kid-friendly movie, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Not just because it's a loose retelling of the life of science fiction movie pioneer Georges Méliès, but also for its clockwork wind-up man.
Now here's your first look at the wind-up man, via a French website. There's also a new set photo, indicating that Johnny Depp will have a brief cameo as the painter M. Rouleau.
Here's how the mechanical man is described in the original "novel in words and pictures" by Brian Selznick:
The man was built entirely out of clockworks and fine machinery... A cascade of perfect movements, with hundreds of brilliantly calibrated actions, coursed through the mechanical man. The key tightened a spring connected to a series of gears that extended down into the base of the figure. There, the last gear turned a series of brass disks with precisely cut edges. Two little hammerlike contraptions came down and trailed along the edges of the notched disks, rising and falling as the disks steadily turned. The actions set in motion by the little hammers were then translated back up through a series of rods that led into the man's torso. There, the moving rods slowly turned other mechanisms in the shoulder and neck. The shoulder affected the elbow, and as the elbow engaged, it sent other movements in a chain reaction down into the wrist, and finally, the hand.