Forget Natalie Portman, Colin Firth and The King’s Speech. The Oscar win everyone should be talking about is The Lost Thing’s win for best short animation. There’s a particular rabbit-shaped place in my heart for Australian picture book illustrator and Lost Thing creator Shaun Tan. So this morning, when I heard he’d won, I gave myself a little high five and pulled some of his books down to re-examine them and wonder at his creative genius.
If you want to wonder at them yourself – or at least wonder at some of his works of mechanical, architectural and zoological fantasy – noodle over to http://www.shauntan.net. For me, while The Lost Thing (the book on which his Oscar winning short is based) is both intriguing and beautiful, Tan’s two best works are The Arrival and The Rabbits.
The Arrival really is a picture book. Using not a word throughout, it tells the story of an immigrant leaving his family and home to journey to a new land. Tan’s fantastical creatures and buildings are at their most effective, showing how much of a stranger in a strange land, how lost and uncertain the Arrival feels in his new country.
In The Rabbits Tan provides the illustrations for Tomorrow When the War Began author John Marsden’s text. The Rabbits is really an allegory for the colonisation of Australia and Tan’s illustrations give Marsden’s words real power. Make sure you’re sitting down when you get to the page with the words ‘and they stole our children’.
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