rated PG

“Hugo,” put simply, is an exceptional expression of wonder, inspiration and respect. In both theme and execution, it is a balanced and nuanced symphony of opposites: a junction of youth and maturity; of hope and despair; of striving for the future by embracing the past. It bows to convention, while celebrating invention. It’s an ode and an elegy and a rallying cry for creativity itself. Above all, it is a movie about movies and their enduring power to enchant, enlighten, and bring people together. “Hugo,” made for film lovers, by film lovers, is a breed of cinema becoming more endangered by the week, one that encourages curiosity, rewards participation, and absolutely earns the right to be seen on the biggest screen you can get to, with as many friends and family you can bring along.

Marvellously adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese, the book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” is itself also a delightfully peculiar thing. An unusual combination of text, historical photography and charcoal drawings by Brian Selznick, it was the first “novel” ever to win the coveted Caldecott Medal for children’s illustration. On the surface, it tells the story of a young tinkerer (played in the film by an assured, electric-eyed Asa Butterfield), a clockmaker’s son orphaned to scrape by living hidden in the walls of a Parisian train station in the 1920s, continuing his elders’ work by keeping the clocks oiled and ticking while feeding himself on burgled, meager helpings of milk and croissants from the station’s cafe and vegetable stand. Hugo’s desperate, Dickensian life unfolds in the book as a series of lushly detailed sketches set between simple, poetic stanzas with action and movement framed from page to page flowing, almost like the animation of an old fashioned flip-book, one leading into the next. The effect is singularly cinematic, reading more like a storyboard treatment for a movie than a proper novel, and it’s easy to see why it would attract Scorsese’s eye.

For as Hugo’s story spools out, it is revealed to be more specifically the story of one of the station’s other mysterious inhabitants: a curmudgeonly old shopkeeper (Ben Kingsley) who appears to be having no fun whatsoever running the station’s little toy store, hawking mechanical wind-up baubles to the passing crowds. Spoilery as it may be, there’s really no way to review this film without giving away that the cantankerous mustachioed codger is in fact the infamously prolific film pioneer, Georges Méliès, who after completing over 500 movies in the world’s first film studio, and inventing a goodly number of special effects and editing techniques that still stand as standard vocabulary of film a century later, had indeed in real life tragically abandoned his prodigious career as a celluloid wizard and maker of dreams to run a small toy shop in the grim years following the Great War. Most of his works were lost, his hand-painted sets torn down and burned, his glorious studio crumbled. Reduced to abject bankruptcy, he sold most of his films to be melted down for bootheels. True story.

It’s worth pointing out here that Scorsese, in addition to being one of our generation’s finest and most acclaimed directors, is also a prominent film historian and preservationist, having himself founded both the The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation in 1990, and the World Cinema Foundation in 2007. Anyone who’s ever seen his deeply detailed documentaries on the history of cinema or listened to his commentaries on DVDs knows the depths of his knowledge and admiration for those who’ve informed his career. The story of Méliès astounding achievements, fall from grace and eventual rediscovery in the train station is one clearly close to his heart, and one he describes with remarkable empathy.

Though popularly known for his tendency to make “family” films of more the “Hey Frank, let’s chop him up” variety than the “A dream is a wish your heart makes’ type, even a casual audit of his filmography reveals an almost pathological obsession with breaking his own form. From romantic historical dramas like “Age of Innocence” to half-baked comedies like “After Hours,” he’s shown time and time again that he likes nothing better than getting out of his own sandbox to play with another genre’s toys. It’s a process that has produced some admittedly inconsistent results (“Kundun” didn’t exactly tear up the box office when it came out), but the good news is that Scorsese hits this one with all he’s got, and then some. His camera simply flies, his music caresses, his colors are rich, his sets lush and gorgeous. This marks the first time he’s ever used 3D to tell a story, and he really shows what can be done with those tools in the right hands, creating a effective sense of realistic depth and perspective that perfectly evokes the emotions of his characters onscreen. It’s an illusion which Méliès (who began as a stage magician) would surely have used himself, if he had the technology in his time.

If you dig good movies, new or old, go see “Hugo.” It’s a marvelously wrought course in film appreciation, and an invigorating reminder that there can be no masters without students, and that Martin Scorsese may be the best of both.