If Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) is anything, and there is a bit of dispute about what it otherwise might be, it's a big-budget valentine to George Melies in the form of a history lesson-slash-docudrama aimed at the rest of us, implicitly admonishing us for forgetting about Melies, or even for never having experienced him at all. Cinema history is usually no match to the mighty forces of cinema present, and so Scorsese's love letter had a cinephile's true urgency to it, but actually he may not have needed to worry so much. Melies is very much alive and well in the film-lovers' universe; if you were to go shopping, you'd do best with Flicker Alley's comprehensive Flicker Alley box set George Melies: First Wizard of Cinema, but the more most and affordable Kino sampler The Magic of Melies and Facets' standard-bearing Melies the Magician may well meet your Melies needs. In France, Melies is an institution, and restoration of his films is a thriving mini-industry. Now, we can add to the pile a rare freak - Flicker Alley's new, steel-cased DVD-Blu-Ray combo presentation of the newly restored all-color edition of Melies's seminal film, the 1902 pathfinder A Trip to the Moon.

First, let's settle some business and take a moment to consider the French pioneer as something other than a film-history staple and an oddity for scholars. It'd be something of a new tack to take in this country, regarding films that, being over a century old, reach right back to the form's infancy, movies' equivalent of cave-painting and hieroglyph-carving. But there's something effervescent and seductive there, a spirit of high innocence and ceaseless invention that transcends the films' role as mere evidence of historical development. For one thing, he was a master image-maker, and several of his iconic creations - most obviously, the man in the moon with the ship-bullet in his eye, from Trip - are undying cultural icons, familiar to the masses who aren't particularly aware of or even interested in the fact the movies were being made during the McKinley administration.

It's become clear by now that Melies is more than just the stop-the-camera special-effects inventor and fin-de-siecle fantasist he's normally defined as having been - or, that those definitions are more resonant cultural ideas than we have usually presumed. Certainly, returning to the artesian source of every manifestation of cinematic mystery and sleight-of-hand has its own aesthetic buzz - the essential elan and spectacle nature of movies can be found in their prenatal form in Melies's short dreams, whether they be mere trickery or elaborate fairy tales, like The Impossible Voyage (1904), a 20-minute epic that uses up more visual imagination and hectic chaos than most features made in the next 40 years.

There are no Melies masterpieces - he worked in the era before such a concept was even hatched. And it's true, as per the classic historical argument, that his films occupy a 2-D theatrical space in comparison with the early Edwin S. Porters and D. W. Griffiths. (The performances in Melies are far more expressive, amusing and, ironically, rich in conviction than any contemporaneous film, however.) But that's like dismissing Bosch because he wasn't Rembrandt. It could be said that as a pioneer Melies expanded the cinematic vocabulary by skipping over the third dimension and extending toward a fourth - a way of seeing that evoked the unseen and the impossible, a use of recorded light that smacked of the metaphysical. He elaborated on a space familiar to everyone then (the theater proscenium) and then, as if by magic, transformed it into the saw-it-with-our-own-eyes unreality of the ghostly and the subconscious. Not for nothing was Freud a youthful contemporary - but Melies never dared to suggest textual insight, making only comedies and always, always striving toward a life-embracingly irreverence, another advantage he had and still has over Porter and Griffith.

But more than that, Melies's movies are beautiful to look at, the first triumphs of filmic design (and the most thoroughly conceived until German Expressionism.) Watching Melies is like seeing a secret, a lost and ancient universe of pretechnological inventions, nursery-rhyme caricature, painted landscapes, cartoon Victorian affluence, trains and ships and cars that are obviously just facades but into which characters climb anyway, moons and stars with human faces, human butterflies, outrageous cross-section views (Wes Anderson's debt remains unpaid), deceptive perspectives, movies within movies, relentless disappearances and reappearances, and so infinitely on. It's an arena of unfettered childlike-ness, a Seine of blissful unreality, as energetic and joyous as a playground, and comparable, as pop art, to the career-work of Maxfield Parrish, Chester Gould, Cole Porter, Bing Crosby, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Kirby, the Beatles and Hayao Miyazaki. Put that in your Cinema 101 DVD deck and smoke it.

This new Trip all that and more - seething with vivid painterly color on every surface, it's palpable proof of a long-forgotten fact: that after a certain point in Melies's production (sometime around the turn of the century), all of his films were hand-colored, frame by frame, print by print. It was thought that none had survived Melies's famed 1923 bonfire of prints, ignited after his company was taken over by Pathe. But, as the accompanying documentary co-directed by Lobster Films' Serge Bromberg makes clear, one semi-decayed copy did arise, in the '90s, when it was then more or less put on ice until digital technology could catch up with its restorative requirements. The aspect of color is fascinating both in its origins and its contemporary guise: in Melies's day, the task of hand-coloring his films was farmed out to a factory of 300 patient women painters, each creating in effect a unique version of a particular film with each brushstroke. Today, as Bromberg's doc illustrates, the "restoration" is hardly that - the crumbling celluloid itself continues its dissolution somewhere, but only after being digitally captured, computer-synched up with other versions of the famous film, and then recolored with software that applies color only and exactly in the handmade patterns and style of the original colorist. (That is, in simulated digital brushstrokes.) Note that singular "colorist" - no one mentions it, but what we have now is a simulacra of a hand-colored version of A Trip to the Moon, not the hand-colored version of A Trip to the Moon, which of course never existed. It's almost as if Albrecht Durer had each of his prints individually hand-tinted, and only one survived, in a crystalline but not quite authentic form.

We're not griping - thanks to digital technology, living tissue of our collective past lives again, and in a form no one has seen since before the Wright Brothers managed sustained flight. Run, don't walk.

For more information about A Trip to the Moon in Color, visit Flicker Alley.

by Michael Atkinson