Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Beside The Lost Thing, The Red Tree and The Arrival are books he has written and illustrated. The lost thing Download the lost thing or read online here in PDF or EPUB. Please click button to get the lost thing book now. All books are in clear copy here, and all files are secure so don't worry about it.

The Lost Thing The Lost Thing is a humorous story about a boy who 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 it’s 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.

For further comment about The Lost Thing. For more about the animated film. For more about the theatre production. 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’.

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. Commview for wifi awus036h wireless lan.

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.