In "Hugo", the title character's greatest desire is to fix what kind of machine?

In Hugo, the title character's greatest desire is to fix an automaton.

Martin Scorsese's 2011 film follows Hugo Cabret, an orphan secretly living inside Paris's Gare Montparnasse railway station. His father had been fascinated by the damaged mechanical figure, and Hugo believes repairing it may reveal a message from his father. The automaton eventually produces a drawing that connects Hugo's family mystery to the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès.

An automaton is a mechanical figure designed to perform movements that imitate a living being. In the film, it is not simply a modern robot or a piece of station machinery; it is a handcrafted clockwork device with a specific artistic and narrative purpose. Its heart-shaped key and intricate mechanisms help turn Hugo's repair project into the story's central mystery.

The film is based on Brian Selznick's illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Its automaton plot also leads to a tribute to Méliès, whose early films helped establish cinema's possibilities for fantasy and visual effects.