{"id":228081,"date":"2026-01-11T10:47:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T10:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/228081\/"},"modified":"2026-01-11T10:47:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T10:47:10","slug":"shaun-tans-tales-from-outer-suburbia-now-adapted-for-tv-shows-the-magic-of-the-everyday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/228081\/","title":{"rendered":"Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia, now adapted for TV, shows the magic of the everyday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Growing up in suburban Perth in the early 1980s, Shaun Tan was frequently bored.<\/p>\n

The waterfront suburb of Hillarys is well developed now, but it was “a bit of a nowhere sort of place” when Tan was a kid.<\/p>\n

“My parents moved out there without much community connection, and they started building a house on this block of land in a place they didn’t know very well,” the author and illustrator says.<\/p>\n

He would explore the park next to his house and ride his bike around with other kids from the neighbourhood. The long days spent circling the suburbs were fertile ground for his imagination.<\/p>\n

“There was that sense that you were in this castaway universe. A lot of boredom but then, occasionally, you would encounter strange things,” he says.<\/p>\n

\"Composite<\/p>\n

Shaun Tan has written and illustrated 14 books, and provided artwork for numerous others. (Supplied: Shaun Tan\/Allen & Unwin)<\/p>\n

“There was always something going on as you’d be riding your bike around this wide, empty street. And what wasn’t going on you would fill with your own thoughts and imagination.”<\/p>\n

Tan grew up to nurture a career from his imaginings, writing and illustrating 14 books (and illustrating more). He even won an Oscar award for a short film adaptation of one of his titles, The Lost Thing.<\/p>\n

Now another of his books \u2014 Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) \u2014 has been adapted into an animated series for ABC iview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This book is directly inspired by the musings, flights of fancies and odd things of his childhood suburb.<\/p>\n

\"Animated<\/p>\n

The TV version of Tales from Outer Suburbia focuses on Klara and Pim, who have reluctantly moved with their mum Lucy to a new house in the suburbs.\u00a0 (ABC iview)<\/p>\n

“I do remember once there was some kind of strange wind and I went down to the park,” Tan describes. “And tons of newspapers had somehow been caught up in the wind and it was just blowing across the landscape.”<\/p>\n

The moment was recreated in the book and makes for a poetic scene in the new series.<\/p>\n

“It was a fairly ordinary thing, but it had its own magic,” Tan says.<\/p>\n

That statement basically summarises most of his work: imbuing the mundanity of the everyday with something uniquely special.<\/p>\n

But don’t call it fantasy<\/p>\n

Tales from Outer Suburbia is full of the bizarre, presented without fanfare: deep sea divers take a walk to the corner milk bar; a tiny pointy-headed visitor moves into the crockery cupboard; sparkling goldfish swirl through the night sky.<\/p>\n

But while there are frequent fantastical elements, the story is simultaneously firmly planted in everyday suburban life.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The whimsical suburban water buffalo from Tales from Outer Suburbia has been brought to life in the new animated series.\u00a0 (Supplied: Shaun Tan\/Allen & Unwin\/ABC iview\u00a0)<\/p>\n

“I’m always wary of fantasy, because it can sort of spin off into something that feels detached and dreamlike,” says Tan.<\/p>\n

He much prefers surrealism, which he first got into because “it’s fun to imagine weird things”.<\/p>\n

“The more I think about it and draw it and write it, the more I realise it’s not actually fantasy, it’s tapping into the fact that all things are strange,” he says.<\/p>\n

“The way we behave, the things we eat, the vehicles we operate: they’re all strange and they’ve all got a complicated history, and they’re all somewhat arbitrary things that happen outside of our control.”Tales from Outer Suburbia on ABC iview<\/a><\/p>\n

In Shaun Tan’s evocative world, a family faces strange encounters and extraordinary experiences in their ‘outer suburb’ while trying to stick together.<\/p>\n

While there’s a glowing, gentle nostalgia in Tan’s work, it’s also tinged with melancholy.<\/p>\n

He says he’s often grappled with the idea of being an outsider, particularly as a half-Asian kid growing up in a very white area.<\/p>\n

“All my stories are about this question of belonging, I’ve noticed, and this constant feeling of displacement,” he muses.<\/p>\n

“It could be a personal thing, but I suspect it’s something a bit deeper and more existential that everybody asks themselves at some point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“You know, ‘how is it that I happen to be born in this particular time and place? And what does it mean?'”<\/p>\n

The curiosity of childhood<\/p>\n

Despite being regularly described as a children’s author and illustrator, Tan has always been puzzled by that label.<\/p>\n

“This TV series might have been the first time actually that I’ve thought about kids,” he laughs.<\/p>\n

Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n

Tan says he never has a particular audience in mind, but he tends to create child protagonists because “they’re more open to being curious”.<\/p>\n

“My work, if anything, is trying to bridge the curiosity that we sustain from childhood into adulthood,” he says.<\/p>\n

“I see these as very adult stories; they just use the memories of childhood to reinvigorate the adult perception. But in doing so, it ends up being very appealing to kids also.”The Tim Winton effect<\/p>\n

While the stories of Tales from Outer Suburbia are based entirely in residential cul-de-sacs \u2014 with the almost romantic overlay of a hot, endless summer \u2014 Tan insists he’s not holding up the suburbs as the perfect place to live.<\/p>\n

“I don’t know if the suburbs get a bad rap, sometimes it’s deserved,” he laughs.<\/p>\n

“I think it’s not so much a bad rap as no rap.”<\/p>\n

His interest in writing about where he grew up was piqued after discovering the work of fellow Perth writer Tim Winton.<\/p>\n

\"Animated<\/p>\n

The deep sea diver in Tales from Outer Suburbia is a nod to the primarily Japanese divers who risked their lives working in Broome’s flourishing pearling industry in the 19th century.\u00a0 (ABC iview)<\/p>\n

“He’s a little bit older than me but he’s grown up in Karrinyup, which was the neighbouring suburb, and he wrote about the landscape,” Tan says.<\/p>\n

“I’d never seen it in literature before, and I was like, ‘holy crap, you can write about the place where you grew up, and it’s as important as anywhere else in the world?'”<\/p>\n

Now, Tan often returns to the suburbs of Perth for inspiration.<\/p>\n

“All of my work is really a variation on that suburban landscape. I might set it on another planet or something, but it’s still the same structure and the same feeling.”<\/p>\n

But he expects readers to find their own connections.<\/p>\n

“I have my idea of how things look and the story that plays out in my mind, but I’m aware that when it goes to another reader, it becomes a very different thing \u2014 and I’ve always encouraged that.”<\/p>\n

And he’s excited to know what viewers will make of his stories in their new form.<\/p>\n

“I’ve always said: the book starts where it ends.”<\/p>\n

Watch Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia free on ABC TV and ABC iview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Growing up in suburban Perth in the early 1980s, Shaun Tan was frequently bored. The waterfront suburb of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,136008,111,139,69,136002,136007,136005,136003,136004,136006,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-228081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-hillarys","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-shaun-tan","14":"tag-shaun-tan-artwork","15":"tag-shaun-tan-books","16":"tag-tales-from-outer-suburbia","17":"tag-tales-from-outer-suburbia-tv-show","18":"tag-the-lost-thing-shaun-tan","19":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}