Click on the cover image above to read some pages of this book! When a boy finds a lost 'thing' on the beach and tries to find its home, no one but him really seems to notice. A quirky tale about finding your place in the world. A boy discovers a bizarre-looking creature while out collecting bottle-tops at a beach. Having guessed that it is lost, he tries to find out who owns it or where it belongs, but the problem is met with indifference by everyone else, who barely notice its presence. Each is unhelpful in their own way; strangers, friends, parents are all unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to day-to-day life.
In spite of his better judgement, the boy feels sorry for this hapless creature, and attempts to find out where it belongs. The Lost Thing received an Honourable Mention at the Bologna International Book Fair, Italy, was named an Honour Book at the CBCA Awards, won an Aurealis Award and a Spectrum Award for illustration in the United States. Original illustrations from the book were exhibited at the Itabashi Art Museum in Tokyo. A London-based film production company, Passion Pictures, is currently adapting The Lost Thing as a short animated film, and the Canberra-based youth theatre company Jigsaw has staged a multi-media adaptation of the story at the National Gallery of Australia in October 2004. Comments on The Lost Thing What started out as an amusing nonsensical story soon developed into a fable about all sorts of social concerns, with a rather ambiguous ending. I became quite interested in the idea of a creature or person who really did not come from anywhere, or have an existing relationship to anything, and was ‘just plain lost’.
The Lost Thing. Such a tone is consistent with the themes of the book, which deals with questions of apathy, particularly the suppression of imagination and playful distraction by pragmatism and bureaucracy, conditions that affect both a society and its individuals. Visually, the book is quite dense, which reflects the environment it depicts. Shaun Tan once said “You know it’s not real, but you can’t help but be drawn into the reality of it”. His picture book ‘The Lost Thing’ reflects on this statement; you know that the storybook world Tan has created is not in the slightest bit real, but if you look closer you can start relating it to your real life.
I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of a character that would represent how I might personally respond to this, so the unnamed narrator is essentially me (although I used to collect sea shells at the beach, rather than bottle-tops). I wrote the story over a couple of weeks on my kitchen table - the original draft was much longer and more detailed, and was set in an ordinary suburb much like the one I grew up in. Later that changed as I developed the idea that the it was a kind of ‘retro-future’ suburb where there were almost no living things left, aside from people, and that everything was very dull and suffocating, but nobody cared too much about this. The text is written as a matter-of-fact anecdote, told by the boy and addressed to the reader, presented as a kind of “what I did over summer” story (hence the use of hand-written text on strips of note paper). Significantly, the creature in question is never physically described, and there is very little said about the environment in which the story unfolds; this is where the illustrations take over. Read by itself the text would sound as though it is about a lost dog in a quite familiar suburb or city, but the pictures reveal a freakish tentacled animal in a surreal a treeless world of green skies, excessive plumbing, concrete and machinery.
The relationship between words and pictures is one of understatement; much of the humour in the story develops from this as the images defy expectation, and all weird absurdities are greeted with a kind of casual disinterest from the narrator. Such a tone is consistent with the themes of the book, which deals with questions of apathy, particularly the suppression of imagination and playful distraction by pragmatism and bureaucracy, conditions that affect both a society and its individuals. Visually, the book is quite dense, which reflects the environment it depicts, having a sense of congestion and compression. There are no empty spaces on the pages, with all images framed by a collage of text and diagrams cut from old physics and maths textbooks. These were used by my Dad when he was an engineering student, and largely inspired much of the book’s aesthetic; they add some sense of the dry and industrial world presented in the paintings, a sort of meaningless functionality - pointless and amusing also.
There is an accidental ‘poetry’ that often occurs using collage, where a chapter heading in an engineering manual might pass as an unintentional comment on life. The bottle-top collection, made from many beer bottle-tops (supplied by my house-mate), seems to perfectly sum up the universe in an abstract way - just right for an endpaper design.
I also liked the idea that, in keeping with the first-person narrative, this book is somehow a product of that world. Stamps and signs marking the cover and title pages, eg. “The Federal Department of Information”, are consistent with the society the narrator comes from, along with other incidental details throughout the book which collectively build a sense of the place in the absence of any overt description by our story-teller. The Lost Thing itself I always knew would be red and big, so very noticeable, which makes us wonder why nobody really notices it (this is the key question of the story, for which there is no single answer). Its design was based on a pebble crab, a small round crustacean with claws that hinge vertically, and I combined this with the look of an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove, with a big lid on top instead of a mouth.
I did not want the creature to have any anthropomorphic features, especially no face, so it’s eyes are reduced to small dots which emerge from a hole. The main thing was that it looked strange and unrecognisable - which is not always easy.
The creature exists in contrast to the world it inhabits, being whimsical, purposeless, out-of-scale and apparently meaningless - all things that the bureaucracy cannot comprehend, and so it is not worthy of any attention. Being a curiosity is only effective if the populace is curious, and they aren’t, being always “too busy” doing more important things. There is perhaps some suggestion that the creature is an accidental by-product of the industrial landscape, a sort of unconscious mutation, appearing on the beach as if ‘washed up’. Towards the end of the book we notice that while the lost thing may be unique, it is not alone - evidently weird creatures regularly appear in the city, but their presence can be measured only by the extent to which they are noticed (ie. Generally not at all). What these things are exactly should be a broad and open question for the reader, given that they symbolise some fairly open-ended notion of ‘things that don’t belong’. About The Author Shaun Tan grew up in Perth.
In school he became known as the 'good drawer' which partly compensated for always being the shortest kid in every class. Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. 5 The Lost Thing is an illustrated book for young readers by award-winning Australian illustrator and author, Shaun Tan. The story is being told, according to the post card from Suburbia on the back cover, to the reader by Shaun. In it, a younger Shaun, idling around by the beach, spots The Lost Thing. At least, it seems lost to him. It's quite big, but when he interacts with it, it seems friendly, and he tries to find out to whom it might belong.
Unsuccessful, he eventually takes it with him. His friend Pete gives some sage counsel, and Shaun takes this large, red, part-metal, part-creature, home. When his parents notice it, Shaun's mother reacts like most do: 'Its feet are filthy!' His father is equally negative: it has to go.
The Lost Thing is hidden in the shed, but Shaun knows that's not a permanent solution, so he tries his best to do the right thing. He encounters bureaucratic indifference in the city (Downtown, 6328th Street, Tall Grey Building #357b) but also helpful advice, and hopes he has ultimately helped The Lost Thing to a good destination. Tan's exquisitely composed colour illustrations are presented on a background of what appears to be heavily foxed pages of technical notes and drawings from a textbook.
In keeping with this, the back cover has a (rather self-deprecating) sticker that includes 'INSPECTOR'S COMMENTS: No perceptible threat to the order of day to day existence. Safe for public consumption'. D@mned by faint praise The departmental stamps with their logos and Latin mottos are smart and funny. There is so much detail in the illustration that each page, even the endpapers and the front and back cover, bears minute examination. Young eyes will be fine, but older readers supervising (or reading for themselves: Tan's books should not be reserved for young readers!) may appreciate a little magnification. It's really worth doing this because the text tells you that the young man has a bottle-top collection, b Cloggie Downunder Thirroul 2019-01-11 true do yourself a favour read this book. Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery.
The Rabbits, The Red Tree, Tales from Outer Suburbia, Rules of Summer and the acclaimed wordless novel The Arrival have been widely translated and enjoyed by readers of all ages. Shaun has also worked as a theatre designer, a concept artist for animated films including Pixar's WALL-E, and directed the Academy Award-winning short film The Lost Thing with Passion Pictures Australia. In 2011 he received the presitgious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, honouring his contribution to international children's literature.
A boy finds a lost ‘thing’ on the beach where he’s scavenging for his bottle top collection. The thing is a large, freakish creature that no one really notices. Having guessed that it is lost, he tries to find out who owns it or where it belongs, but the problem is met with indifference by everyone else, who barely notices its presence.
Each is unhelpful in their own way; strangers, friends, parents are all unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to day-to-day life. In spite of his better judgement, the boy feels sorry for this hapless creature, and attempts to find out where it belongs. A quirky tale about finding your place in the world. Shaun Tan was born in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In school he became known as the ‘good drawer’ which partly compensated for always being the shortest kid in every class.
He graduated from the University of WA in 1995 with joint honours in Fine Arts and English Literature, and currently works full-time as a freelance artist and author in Melbourne. Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. Books such as The Rabbits, The Red Tree, The Lost Thing and the acclaimed wordless novel The Arrival have been widely translated throughout Europe, Asia and South America, and enjoyed by readers of all ages. Shaun has also worked as a theatre designer, and worked as a concept artist for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar’s WALL–E.
He is currently directing a short film with Passion Pictures Australia; his latest book is Rules of Summer (October 2013). Shaun is the winner of the 2011 Astrid Lindgren prize, the world’s richest children’s literature award. The award described Shaun as ‘a masterly visually storyteller’. The film adaptation of The Lost Thing won the Oscar for best animated short film in 2011.
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