Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing

The Lost Thing tells the story of a boy who discovers a bizarre lost creature at the beach and sets out to find somewhere it can belong. Shaun Tan emphasises that he writes picture books not children’s books. His books, like many picture books, deal with complex themes.

There is an appealing simplicity in the form, which is not to say that it is necessarily simple: the restrained coupling of text and image can contain any level of poetic sophistication or complexity. ‘Art,’ as Einstein reminds us, ‘is the expression of the most profound thoughts in the simplest way.

Accordingly, Tan’s illustrations do not ‘explain’ text but build a landscape of questions and ideas.

In creating the images for his book The Lost Thing, Shaun Tan drew inspiration from artists as diverse as Edward Hopper, John Brack and Hieronymous Bosch. Hopper and Brack contributed to the look of the boy’s world and Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights inspired the look of the utopian world of lost things.

Picture books are not always books for young children.

Go to Shaun Tan’s website to read what he has written about the picture book form and the way he sees his role as writer and illustrator.

In this essay Tan uses the metaphor of the battery to describe the relationship between words and pictures in his stories and the role of the reader: "When working I often like to think of words and images as opposite points on a battery, creating a potential voltage through a ‘gap’ between telling and showing. It requires the reader’s imagination to complete the circuit, their thoughts and feelings being the current that fills the silent space, without prescription."

When the boy and the lost thing visit The Federal Department of Odds and Ends, they meet a sad, lost, forgotten creature with a small voice. This creature reappears in the final page of the story.

When adapted to film, the story of The Lost Thing continues to explore a world where people have lost the ability to really see what is around them or to recognise and value something special and extraordinary.

The film draws on the melancholy sense of loss accompanying the boy’s memories of the lost thing. He was the only one in his bleak and soulless world to notice the strange lost creature, and the only one who cared enough to find a place for it to belong.

However, after glimpsing the magical world of lost things, the boy is left on the other side of a closed door looking towards a future where he will become like everybody else: someone who ‘stops noticing’.

In the book, the reader remains quite separate from the lost thing and the boy, whom we generally see in the distance. In the film, we are drawn into the world and connected more closely with the boy and his experience.

For Shaun Tan a work of art is required to make us ask questions about what we already know.

Theme: refers to ideas or issues that are beneath the surface of the story. Themes relate to concerns, beliefs, or feelings about life in general.

For instance, in The Lost Thing, although they are not stated, a couple of themes might be loneliness and friendship.

In the audio commentary that accompanies the DVD of The Lost Thing, Shaun Tan describes the city where the boy lives as having ‘a dead heart’.

In The Lost Thing, Shaun Tan uses symbolism to create a link between what we see on screen and our everyday lives. A writer or a filmmaker is using symbolic language when s/he uses an image that stands for a larger and more complex idea or set of ideas. In The Lost Thing the two worlds are symbolic – but so too are smaller elements of each world.

Shaun Tan worked as part of a creative team to turn his book into an animation. As a consequence, the book and the film share a similar look and feel. However, these two texts are also very different as they are completely different art forms.

Shaun Tan describes the soundscape of The Lost Thing animation as offering another dimension to the artwork, as if he was given another colour palette to use.

In the midst of all of the complex technical decisions the team needed to make as part of the 3D animation process, they struggled to find the right person for the narrative voice-over:

In this online interview, Shaun Tan describes some of the difficulties involved in adapting his story for the screen.

Mise-en-scène is an expression related to the design aspects of a film (or theatre) production. It refers to everything that appears in the frame. Key aspects of mise-en-scène include, but are not limited to, composition, sets, props, actors (or, in the case of animation, characters) and lighting.

Mise-en-scène is used to tell you more about the story that is being told. For a clearer explanation and analysis of mise-en-scène, pause on a selected frame of a scene from The Lost Thing and discuss the mise-en-scène and its relationship to the narrative. Consider the following in your discussion and analysis:

Mise-en-scène is important in creating mood or an atmosphere.

When Shaun Tan is writing and illustrating his books, he works in a portrait format but, when adapting The Lost Thing to the screen, he needed to work in the wider 16 by 9 landscape format.

Choose a picture book (either by Shaun Tan or a different author) and imagine you are turning it into a short film. Use the create a storyboard resource for the following activity.

In the picture book, the boy character is generally viewed at a distance.

However, the animation form requires a more intimate connection to character, with a range of different shots that bring the viewer closer to the character.

In responding to this different storytelling form, Tan had to provide more visual information about this character.

For instance, he designed a range of facial expressions, gestures and stances for the digital effects and animation team to use when creating the character.

Look at the following images. One has been taken directly from the book and the other is a character drawing made as part of the pre-production process.

While Shaun Tan worked with the animator and the CG artist to create more developed characters for The Lost Thing, he was also aware of the dangers of trying to make the characters look too real. If an animation or an image looks too similar to the real thing it can be quite unsettling. This effect is described as entering the ‘uncanny valley’.

When creating The Lost Thing book, Shaun Tan was inspired by his father’s old scientific and engineering text books.

He created a background out of these books to suggest a world without imagination.

Tan likes to think that The Lost Thing was the first piece of fiction ever produced in a society that focused only on facts with no interest in personal stories.

The collage of text book pages that dominates the book is featured in the opening credits and in the sequence that opens with the line: ‘I asked a few people if they knew anything about it.'

When adapting The Lost Thing for the screen, the creative team (including Shaun Tan) could not rely too heavily on the pre-existing work. This is how Shaun Tan described the process to ACMI curator Fiona Trigg:

In producing any adaptation, you have to start from scratch. You’re not just taking one image and thinking ‘Okay, let’s try and turn this into a scene, what do we have to build? What do we have to move?’ That was very rare actually if you look from book to film that there are scenes that are directly translated.

Shaun Tan describes the book as ‘concept art’ that can be referred to in the filmmaking process.

Imagine a world without imagination...

The lost thing is a playful, purposeless creature who finds itself in a fact-driven universe where there is no art, music or literature.

Shaun Tan, like many artists, draws all the time, exploring ideas that may come to nothing or, alternatively, form the basis for a story. The story of The Lost Thing emerged from a small sketch, a drawing of a tiny man talking to a huge crab on a beach.

Shaun Tan’s discussion of his creative process as a picture book writer and illustrator is illuminating and engaging.

Shaun Tan comments that when he first begins a project, he starts off with very small sketches:

Starting a project, particularly a creative project can be hard and people have different ways of working creatively and different techniques for getting started.

It is amazing to think that The Lost Thing was inspired by a single tiny drawing of a boy sitting on the beach talking to a large crab.

The City in The Lost Thing is a place without imagination or creativity. It exists to work efficiently but not to make its inhabitants' lives better.

The place where The Lost Thing is set is a place without imagination.

At the end of The Lost Thing, the boy has grown up and no longer sees 'lost things':

(In the book the line reads 'Maybe there aren't many lost things around anymore nor maybe I just stopped noticing them.'

When designing the city, Shaun Tan was inspired by Collins Street, 5p.m., a painting by Australian artist John Brack. The painting is owned by the National Gallery of Victoria and you can find out more about this painting on the NGV website.

When animating the city scene inspired by Collins Street, 5p.m., the CG supervisor Tom Bryant 're-purposed' a set of 8-10 basic characters. He was then able to re-use assets that had already been animated, simply by changing characters' hair or clothing.

As well as being the writer and creator of the animation of The Lost Thing, Shaun Tan worked as co-director with Andrew Ruhemann and was involved in all aspects of the production process.

Despite being a very ‘painterly’ book, The Lost Thing film was made using 3D animation techniques.

Before making any specific creative decisions, the producer, Sophie Byrne and the directors, Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann, needed to make a number of decisions about how to tell the story. As well as deciding how long the film would be, the creative team needed to decide the audience the film would be aimed at.

Any form of storytelling requires the creator, or the creative team, to adopt a particular tone. Mood is about the feeling and atmosphere created within the story but tone relates to the audience and provides information about how to ‘read’ or understand the story.

As part of the CG animation process, Tan worked with the CG supervisor to create a painted effect. This required Tan to paint textures and then scan them. They were then wrapped around the models.

The storyboarding process is the same whether you are producing a live action film or an animation.

When creating the Federal Department of Odds and Ends, Shaun Tan had to find a balance between the surreal and the ordinary.

If everything is too ordinary, people stop paying attention to some extent; they stop asking questions about what's going on... Whereas if you make it a little bit weird and you exaggerate some features, suddenly people realise the slight absurdity of some bureaucratic processes.

Find out more about the meaning and function of bureaucracy and consider why certain kinds of bureaucracy are described as 'absurd', 'soulless' and 'inhuman'. You might like to start with the discussion of Franz Kafka's The Trial on Shmoop. 

The Federal Department of Odds and Ends creates the feeling of isolation, authority and lifelessness, yet is still a place of employment for humans.

When talking about The Lost Thing, Shaun Tan calls the world of the lost things Utopia. A utopia is an ideal or perfect society.

Creating the animated world of lost things was one of the greatest challenges faced by the animation team. As well as making the creatures depicted in the book three dimensional and animating them, Tan designed many new lost things.

In describing the decisions made about the music for the film, Michael Yezerski, the composer, explains that in the Utopia scene, he had to decide between drawing attention to the oddness of the characters in this world or focusing on the story. It was decided that the music be designed in such a way that the 'audience felt the conclusion of the story'.

Consider the emotional effect on the viewer of the final scene in which we see the boy grown up. Some people argue that the animation should have left the viewer in the world of the lost things, rather than bringing them 'back down to earth'.

Visit Shaun Tan's website and the website for The Lost Thing to see Shaun Tan's designs for the creatures that populate the world of lost things.

Imagine you are creating an exhibition for The Lost Thing. Watch this video that describes the exhibition Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing: From Book To Film for some ideas.