{"id":373500,"date":"2025-12-26T18:27:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T18:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/373500\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T18:27:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T18:27:07","slug":"my-work-is-often-misunderstood-shaun-tan-on-his-surreal-tales-from-outer-suburbia-shaun-tan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/373500\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018My work is often misunderstood\u2019: Shaun Tan on his surreal Tales from Outer Suburbia | Shaun Tan"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the internet\u2019s slop era, where even auteurs such as Studio Ghibli\u2019s Hayao Miyazaki can find their distinctive style cribbed en masse by platforms like ChatGPT, perhaps it was inevitable that Australian artist Shaun Tan<\/a> would encounter his own AI imitators.<\/p>\n

For the moment, at least, Tan can laugh about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe AI doesn\u2019t get it,\u201d Tan chuckles. \u201cIt\u2019s a superficial simulation \u2013 it\u2019s like they know the symptoms, but they don\u2019t know the disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

The award-winning writer and illustrator isn\u2019t totally sold on his own metaphor, but if epidemiologists could trace the source of his particular creative condition, it would probably be somewhere on the outskirts of Perth\u2019s northern suburbs in the 1980s, where Tan grew up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m like one of those old migrants that talks nostalgically about an old country that doesn\u2019t even exist,\u201d Tan says over the phone from his current home in Melbourne.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn one hand, [that outer suburbia where I grew up] was potentially boring and a little dreary and quite artistically uninspiring. On the other hand, anything\u2019s possible and nobody cares. You can just create or imagine something \u2013 it\u2019s like a blank canvas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shaun Tan in his studio, 2025. Photograph: ABC<\/p>\n

For a few hours a day, that blank canvas was punctuated by what Tan calls the \u201cartform of the suburbs\u201d \u2013 television. Only \u201cthree glorious channels\u201d were available, but Tan would tape Doctor Who, Astro Boy and Twilight Zone reruns on the family VCR each night. It was those shows that kickstarted his interest in fantasy, science fiction, and eventually writing and illustrating his own stories.<\/p>\n

He poured these memories and feelings into his 2008 book, Tales from Outer Suburbia \u2013 15 illustrated short stories that reimagined those suburbs as a familiar but surreal landscape. These tales were full of memorable, unlikely characters, from a giant water buffalo in a vacant lot to a wandering deep-sea diver \u2013 an allusion to Western Australia\u2019s history of migrant Japanese pearl divers who once braved the bends in their hundreds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think my work is often misunderstood,\u201d Tan says of Outer Suburbia\u2019s look and feel. \u201cI\u2019m always at pains to say my style is not \u2018quirky\u2019, it\u2019s not \u2018weird\u2019. It\u2019s about normal things, normal feelings. They\u2019re just displaced into other objects, but the displacement helps you to think about the deeper feelings and deeper meanings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still from Shaun Tan\u2019s Tales From Outer Suburbia. Illustration: Highly Spirited\/Flying Bark Productions\/ABC<\/p>\n

On 1 January, Tales of Outer Suburbia lands on the small screen as a 10-part animated ABC series. While Tan\u2019s work has been adapted for the stage many times \u2013 including Opera Australia\u2019s Helpmann award-winning take on the John Marsden-penned colonial allegory The Rabbits \u2013 it\u2019s only his second major screen work.<\/p>\n

Tan\u2019s first screen foray, 2011\u2019s The Lost Thing, scored him an Academy Award for best short film \u2013 but he never considered Tales from Outer Suburbia to be particularly adaptable.<\/p>\n

\u201cI live in that sort of strange, little, rarefied, silent world of hand-drawn pictures and very vignette-type stories, quite uncertain stories I would say,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He has, however, always been fascinated to hear how readers and other creators interpret his personal vision.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou come to understand that the story becomes a very different thing once it leaves your desk, and a very mutable thing,\u201d Tan says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne kid said \u2018I love the story about the two sisters\u2019. And I\u2019m like \u2018What sisters?\u2019 And then I realised, well, I don\u2019t really give an identity to my protagonist, so they [young readers] just read themselves, and what they knew, into the stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Geraldine Hakewill (Wanted) voices mum Lucy; newcomers Brooklyn Davies and Felix Oliver Verg\u00e9s voice siblings Klara and Pim, respectively. Illustration: Highly Spirited\/Flying Bark Productions\/ABC<\/p>\n

In the series, those episodic vignettes are linked by the story of a family \u2013 teenager Klara (Brooklyn Davies), 10-year-old Pim (Felix Oliver Verg\u00e9s) and mum Lucy (Geraldine Hakewill) \u2013 who move to the suburbs after a loss. All three use imagination to make sense of the same blank canvas Tan encountered: Klara draws, Lucy is a frustrated writer and Pim loves to tell stories.<\/p>\n

Tan is listed as a creative director for the series but credits its large team of collaborators for putting creation at the heart of the show.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like that the series does have that self-reflexive feeling; that it\u2019s a group of humans making imagery about humans making imagery,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re always questioning what it means to be an artist. How does it relate to myself and my real world experience? And what\u2019s it like to be a person alive in the world at this particular place or time?\u201d<\/p>\n

Still from Shaun Tan\u2019s Tales From Outer Suburbia. Illustration: Highly Spirited\/Flying Bark Productions\/ABC<\/p>\n

Like the Perth suburbs Tan once knew, the show arrives in a media landscape unrecognisable from his childhood. Those three intermittent channels now compete with a continual feed of online content \u2013 something Tan has seen first-hand as the father of two young children.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy kids like to sort of bomb out after school and watch a bit of YouTube, and I\u2019m just like \u2018Oh my goodness, this is very different to the stuff that I would view\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m wary of starting to sound like an old man, waving my fist and talking about coherent narrative,\u201d he laughs. \u201c\u2018Where\u2019s the arc?!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

While the material his kids are watching is \u201calien\u201d to him, their responses to this \u201cconfusing media landscape\u201d remind him of his younger self.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up with the advent of computer games and a lot of bad commercial television. It was a confusing landscape,\u201d he says. \u201cMe and my friends would have to negotiate that, and try and find anchored, human value in all of this nonsense. And I can see my own kids doing the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the internet\u2019s slop era, where even auteurs such as Studio Ghibli\u2019s Hayao Miyazaki can find their distinctive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-373500","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}