Martin Scorsese’s no stranger to thinking outside the box, but normally not too far outside the box. Let’s face it, he has a comfort zone that usually involves fedoras and rated-R content. It works for him. Will this? Variety says he’s doing a movie based on a children’s book. It’s called The Invention of Hugo Cabret and, since it’s an award winner, presumably this is one of the good children’s books and not one of those half-assed pop-ups cranked out by bored celebrity moms who want to call themselves authors.

The book is a period piece, set in 1930s Paris and focused on a 12-year-old boy named Hugo. The boy lives in a train station and tries to solve the mystery of a broken robot for his father. Robots in the 30s? Something’s amiss.

Normally when Scorsese does anything this weird, I get excited. Bringing out the Dead is, without question, my favorite Marty movie and also one of his strangest. But children’s literature? That hardly seems like a fit for America’s most traditionally rated-R director. Could this be his Rocky and Bullwinkle? Or is this his attempt to show up Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze? Unlike Jonze most recent source material, Hugo Cabaret isn’t just a couple of sentences on a handful of pages. It’s a 533 page book full of photos and story. There’s plenty to work with.