A dazzling new book is less than meets the eye.

THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRETBy Brian Selznick Scholastic. 531 pp. $22.99 (ages 9-12)

This 534-page doorstopper is no ordinary kids' book, for sure. With its nods to the graphic novel, the flip book and the storyboard, it is an ambitious tribute to early cinema that some have already dubbed a masterpiece and a work of genius. (Martin Scorsese is rumored to be interested in filming it.) It's such a likeably earnest book that one wishes it were so. But the truth is that The Invention of Hugo Cabret is more about the razzle-dazzle of novelty than any particular artistic merit. The first movies transfixed people too, but that doesn't mean their plots weren't mostly pretty hokey and their characters stiffer than a girder. Just so, in Hugo Cabret, the method of telling outshines the tale.

Not that the tale isn't promising. It's 1931. Hugo, a 12-year-old orphan, lives behind the walls of a Paris train station, where he winds all the clocks daily, pilfers his food and guards a secret -- he is restoring a battered automaton, or mechanical man, that his late father had found. His is a dim, dark world dominated by images of moving parts and meshing gears. So it's no surprise when his petty thieving triggers a clash with a station toy vendor and his granddaughter, Isabelle, who have a few secrets of their own. The two kids eventually bond, fractiously, to solve what prove to be interlocking mysteries. Not to give away too much, the sour old toy-seller is revealed as the real-life pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès, whose visionary movies had once captivated Hugo's father: "It was like seeing your dreams in the middle of the day."

There's obviously a lot here for fans of idea-driven mysteries such as those by Blue Balliett: the feel for a real city, the intellectual zest, the neat folding of fact into fiction. Selznick's passion for the cinema -- both its history and its sleight-of-hand style of enchantment -- also shines through, the way Balliett's love of architecture lit up her otherwise humdrum The Wright 3.

There's more: Selznick, a relative of the late, great film producer David O. Selznick, makes his literary homage to the cinema actually mimic a silent movie. The book opens and ends in darkness, like a theater. The black-bordered pages suggest a screen. Periodically, the words stop, and the action advances via multi-page sequences of shadowy pencil illustrations or scenes from old films that flicker by and zoom in and out like images recorded by a handheld camera. When the text resumes, it carries on where the pictures left off. The effect truly is mesmerizing.

But not mesmerizing enough. If this story were laid out bald on the page, as in a conventional novel, it would be nearly as thin as a script. Hugo, the star, is all concept, barely more animated than the automaton he's putting back together: "Hugo showed up at the toy booth . . . prepared to work. He could feel the cogs and wheels in his head spinning in different directions." "Somewhere a clock struck midnight, and Hugo's future seemed to fall perfectly into place." Harry Potter this is not.

Isabelle seems less a flesh-and-blood girl than a plot mechanism with an inexplicably bad temper. The friction between her and Hugo is interesting at first -- they're forever accusing each other of lying and concealing secrets -- but it soon becomes apparent that it's basically a device for postponing important revelations. The same is true of the keys, notebooks, messages and other staples of juvenile detective fiction swirling about in the general murkiness. Picture sequences or no, it gets tedious.

The problem is that Selznick, who has made his name as an illustrator, is really not much of a writer. There are places in Hugo Cabret where his doggedly declarative style yields moments of spare beauty. At one point, for example, Hugo and Isabelle look down on Paris from behind the station's huge glass clock. "They watched the stars, and they saw the moon hanging high above them," Selznick writes. "The city sparkled below, and the only sound was the steady rhythmic pulse of the clock's machinery." But most of the time, the prose has a one-foot-in-front-of the-other quality that's about as interesting as watching a clock hand move: "Etienne helped Hugo navigate the card catalog so he could find the book he needed and then brought him to the correct shelf. Etienne stood on his toes, pulled the book off the shelf, and handed it to Hugo, who sat right where he was and opened it. Etienne sat down next to him." It's not just the pictures that push Hugo Cabret to 534 pages.

Mr. Scorsese, maybe you can make this story live.