The Inimitable Shaun Tan

Did you watch the Academy Awards? If you did, you probably know that The King's Speech won Best Picture and Colin Firth won Best Actor. You might remember that Natalie Portman won Best Actress and Toy Story 3 won Best Animated Feature Film, while Christian Bale and Melissa Leo won for Best Supporting Actor and Actress, respectively. But the burning question would be, "Who won for Short Animated Film?"

The answer, of course, is our own Shaun Tan (along with Andrew Ruhemann). And by "our own," I mean, he's a children's book guy! This would be an author-illustrator who made a short film of his picture book, The Lost Thing, and won an Oscar. Ta-da!

Of course, Academy Awards aside, Shaun Tan has made a name for himself in the world of children's books as an innovator—to the point of being strange. Because isn't that what it takes to really go in new directions?

I first discovered Shaun Tan when I came across his book, The Red Tree. It's a picture book, but you would probably hand it to kids between the ages of 10 and 18, and you should seriously consider giving it to any 23-year-olds, 45-year-olds, and 88-year-olds you know while you're at it. The Red Tree is a riff on dealing with confusion, obstacles, depression, just about anything that makes life feel insurmountable. Like Pandora's box, this book ends on a note of hope. Watch for a red leaf hidden in every spread... Here's one of my favorite images (above right), which is accompanied by the words, "nobody understands."

Lucky, lucky you! Arthur A. Levine Books just came out with Lost and Found: Three by Shaun Tan, a book uniting The Red Tree, The Lost Thing, and The Rabbits in one volume.

The Lost Thing, as mentioned above, is the story that inspired Tan's Oscar-winning animated short. You know all those cute old-fashioned picture books in which a sweet little child finds a lost kitten and brings it home and takes good care of it? Well, this is an out-there reimagining of that type of premise. Think E.T., only without the Bambi eyes. And really, the Lost Thing isn't an alien at all. Here's how the story begins:

So you want to hear a story? Well, I used to know a whole lot of pretty interesting ones. Some of them so funny you'd laugh yourself unconscious, others so terrible you'd never want to repeat them. But I can't remember any of them. So I'll just tell you about the time I found that lost thing.

Our narrator stops "working tirelessly on [his] bottle-cap collection" when he spies the lost thing, which looks like a cross between a giant red old-timey water heater and an octopus. Only not. Naturally, the young narrator takes the lost thing home. Gently weird comedy ensues.

When reading The Rabbits (written with John Marsden), it's probably a good idea to remember that Tan is Australian. The story has universal application, certainly, but my mind flies to an image of the British colonization of Australia—and other lands—before circling outward to picture our planet's domination and industrialization in general by wealthy nations and corporations. Yep, The Rabbits is an allegory, and it doesn't have a happy ending. Call this a precursor to The Arrival, Tan's depiction of the immigrant experience. Only The Rabbits is a much darker story.

Tales from Outer Surburbia is a book of illustrated short stories, all of them odd and more or less allegorical, beginning with Tan's oracular water buffalo (see illustration, right). I'm especially fond of "Eric," a new take on alien visitors, or rather "foreign exchange students." Or "Distant Rain," which sets out to answer the question, "Have you ever wondered what happens to all the poems people write?" "No Other Country" will have you looking for your own inner courtyard, whereas "Alert But Not Alarmed" will have you finding new uses for a backyard missile. As a group, the stories are poignant, even haunting. They will leave you wondering and pondering.

Tan's masterpiece up to this point, The Arrival, is a lengthy, wordless illumination of what it's like to be an immigrant. The entire book is done in sepia tones, with the occasional use of blacks and grays. A man leaves his country and crosses the sea to make a new home for his wife and daughter. He will send for them as soon as he gets settled. He looks like he's leaving some vaguely Eastern European country and traveling to the United States or, of course, Australia, but you will soon realize that the country he reaches is not any identifiable one on our planet, but a wholly alien landscape. Except, that's what it's like to immigrate. The man's confusion, people's small kindnesses, the reasons others have left their own countries—all these and more are described in subtle, wonderful illustrations (see artwork below left). After I read this for the first time, I just sat on my couch in shock, smiling with the knowledge that someone had created such a thing, a book as touching as it is beautiful.

As an artist, Tan often works in shades of brown or gray, occasionally lit by spots of color. He uses mixed media, including acrylics, colored pencil, and collage. He is fond of depicting machinery that is neither completely contemporary nor steampunk, more like the rusting gears of a mid-priced, elderly space station one or two galaxies over. I'm guessing he wouldn't mind having a drink with Han Solo in that intergalactic bar in Star Wars, but Tan's work isn't straight sci-fi, either. Here are a few memorable details:
—The title page of The Red Tree shows a grandfather clock in a field of cut wheat or yellowing grass. A scattering of small letters is white on the grass background and gray out of frame. If you look again, you will see that the spill of letters includes a handful of red ones. These turn out to be the book title.
—In The Arrival, Tan has invented a whole new language so that you, the reader, will be confused right along with the immigrant when trying to read street signs and other public print.
—The passage of time during the ocean voyage in The Arrival is shown by a gorgeous spread which is essentially a diary of clouds.
—In Tales from Outer Suburbia, the Table of Contents is made up of postage stamps.
—You know that feeling of gloom and depression we sometimes characterize by saying someone has a black cloud over their head? Well, in The Red Tree, Tan illustrates this in the middle of a big city by having a gigantic, ugly fish floating along just over the main character's head. (Only "floating" seems like too light of a word in this context! See artwork, below right.)
—You've never seen sheep like the ones in The Rabbits. You will never want to see sheep like that in real life. And check out how the cows, which have too many legs, are pre-marked to be cut up into meat.
—In The Lost Thing, the main character's bottle-cap collection is only mentioned once, but the endpapers depict row upon row of bottle caps.

Shaun Tan has won numerous awards, including the Hugo and Nebula awards for fantasy art and Australia's 2010 Dromkeen Medal for his contribution to children's books. Check out his biography on Wikipedia for a complete list.

For most people, even the talented ones, creativity is a gentle hum, or maybe a bee-buzz. For Shaun Tan, it's a roar. Not the roar of a waterfall or even a lion or a movie T-Rex. It would have to be the roar of something new, something with gears and tentacles and hair like flowers. There's a lot of great creativity out there, but only a few others strike me as working (or having worked) at this level: Andy Goldsworthy and Itchiku Kubota, for example.

The most obvious gift someone like Shaun Tan bestows upon the rest of us is the work itself, but I'm also grateful for the inspiration I get from seeing the farthest reaches of possibility (AKA Outer Suburbia). Reading Tan's work makes me want to take my own creative life to the next level. To try something new. To give out a little roar of my own.

Note for Worried Parents: Shaun Tan's work is not for small children. It's thoughtful and mature, even a little dark. But it will inspire some rich conversations with older children. My suggestion is 10 and up, or, depending on the child, 12 and up.

Also: I recommend you go to the "Books" page of Tan's website and click on The Arrival, then read his explanation of how he researched and created the book. It really adds to the reading experience to learn about some of his thinking during the process.

Update, 3-29-11: Shaun Tan has won that highly prestigious international book award, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. As well he should!

Update, 4-7-11: Here are Betsy Bird's thoughts on Shaun Tan's win at Fuse #8, along with a link to the author-illustrator's video response.

Update, 4-26-11: Another nice interview, with the rather cool info that Shaun Tan was a concept artists on Pixar's WALL-E. No wonder that movie looked so great!

Update, 8-21-11: Shaun Tan has won the Hugo Award 2011 for Best Professional Artist.

2009 Newbery Award: Indies vs. Blockbusters and the F Factor

The other day I came across an article on the Internet about which Academy Award winners for Best Picture shouldn’t have won over the years. Jonathan Crow wrote, “Like the Supreme Court and the College of Cardinals, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is an exclusive and obscure deliberative body that is prone to its own brand of weirdness. The Academy loves to reward actors who play endearing lunatics and actresses who hag it up for a part. It throws trophies at lavish historical epics and anything about the Holocaust” (“Oscar’s Worst ‘Best Picture’ Picks,” Oscar Blog, 1/21/09).

It took me a second to realize why this sounded so familiar. Then I thought, oh yeah, this guy took a page straight out of the recent kerfluffle over the choices made by the Newbery Committee, a debate which began with Anita Silvey's infamous School Library Journal article questioning the relevance of the award. I read more of the ensuing dialogue (or perhaps slugfest—although, do librarians even have fists?) in children’s book blogs over the weeks that followed and eventually concluded that the whole thing was a matter of indies vs. blockbusters, a question that constantly dogs Academy Awards picks.

Back when I was young, I remember being surprised to hear that Chariots of Fire had won the Academy Award for Best Picture. I had loved the movie myself, but I hadn't thought anyone else would care about what seemed like an obscure little film. Since then, I have become wiser in the ways of the Academy, and it no longer surprises me when an indie or at least a "quiet" film kicks the stuffing out of a blockbuster (Titanic aside, but then, Titanic had indie pretensions, despite its high ticket sales—historical fiction seems to be inherently appealing to Academy voters). In fact, take a look at this year’s Oscar race: The Black Knight is arguably brilliant, but it lost out early, at the mere nominating stage, to a movie with underdog and indie appeal, Slumdog Millionaire.

I wasn’t around for the travesty of the heart-warming How Green Was My Valley stealing Best Picture from Citizen Kane back in 1941, but I do recall Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction in 1994. As a fantasy fan and an English major, it’s easy for me to picture this kind of warfare—whether about films or books—as the righteous ivory tower types wielding their artsy, intellectual swords against the crude attacks of pop culture troglodytes. I'm hesitant to go there, however, because I prefer to think of the battle itself as being very useful.

Unfortunately, left to their own devices, purists tend to go to extremes. In the children’s book world, this means forgetting that the works in question aren’t required to be the equivalent of somber, sobering grown-up novels, only with prettier jacket art and shorter main characters. The Newbery Committee may not need someone like Anita Silvey to remind them that the books they review are intended to be read by still other short people, but I would say that the historic, ongoing struggle between intellectuals and pop culture in this and other fields forces the former to think in richer, more dimensional ways.

I did finally get my hands on a copy of last year’s winner, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz. It’s arguably an obscure book from the point of view of fans of photobiographies of the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus, but I have no problem admitting that Schlitz’s creation is brilliant. I mean that as a reader, a poetry person, and a writer, as well as a teacher. One goal of the Newbery Committee is to select books that will stand the test of time. They have certainly made their share of successful choices: we need only look at Holes (1999), The Giver (1994), and Maniac Magee (1991) for some shining examples. Sure, the committee has missed a few here and there, but considering the pressure they’re under—and the gazillion books they have to evaluate—they actually hit the mark surprisingly often.

Which brings us to this year’s winner, The Graveyard Book (see my review dated 1/10/09). Why did this book win, and what makes it such a wonderful choice? If Newbery Committee members were truly bound by the fairly predictable concept of a Merchant/Ivory-type children’s book, they would have chosen Laurie Halse Anderson’s Chains, Helen Frost’s Diamond Willow, or maybe Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath (all terrific books, to be sure). But this is the same team that chose Holes a few years back, so let’s give them some credit for thinking outside the box.

After all, it’s a given that the winning book must be well written. That means there will always be a solid group of strong contenders at the top, any one of which would be a good choice. In that case, did Shlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village win in 2008 because it offered us a nice history lesson? Nope. The book had the F Factor, and so does The Graveyard Book. That would be the Freshness Factor, and thank heavens for it! I suspect that far from being out of touch, the Newbery Committee has made some truly innovative choices over the past decade.

Think back to the works that have changed the field of children’s books: Where the Wild Things Are and A Wrinkle in Time, for starters. The best books don’t just please us with their beautiful language and capture us with their appealing characters, they surprise us. I can’t say that every Newbery winner, every single year, has been stunningly fresh, but I believe that the best of them have been. A fresh book is one that is intriguing. It is not necessarily experimental in the sense of being avant garde, but it feels new. (An example of a fresh film would be The Sixth Sense—remember how its plot twists revived jaded audiences?)

I’ll confess that while I love books as much as I ever did, I’ve gotten to the point where it takes an amazing book for me to truly lose myself in wonder. Only two books I read this past year really swept me away—one was Alabama Moon, which I finally read, and the other was The Graveyard Book. So when I heard that the Newbery Committee chose Gaiman’s book for the medal, I felt such a rush of happiness. Their choice was the perfect rebuttal to all of the commotion about the committee’s work: a book that is not only well written in terms of language, characters, and plot; a book that not only gives us encounters with tenderness, humor, and fear; but a book that surprises us with its fresh, strange beauty.