The Lost Thing

Initial Reading - text only

The-Lost-Thing-written-text.pdf

TASK

Identify the narrative structure used in this story. What is the orientation, complication and resolution?

Utopias and Dystopias

Fold a large page in half. Depict a “perfect” world on one side/half while the other side/half depict an oppressive world. Think about what oppressive means!

Your depictions can include words, colours or images that relate to urban places, technology, people, relationships, values, nature, activities or food.

Reading of the picture book

Read the picture book The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan- either as a class or individually. Then complete a See Think Wonder activity for the story.

See

Describe this picture book– what did you see when you read it? What style and techniques were used?

Think

What did the picture book make you think about? What is the message or theme?

Wonder

What did the picture book make you wonder or want to know more about?

The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan

This 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 its presence. Each is unhelpful; strangers and parents are all unwilling to entertain this uninvited interruption to day-to-day life. Even the boy’s friend is unable to help, despite some interest. The boy feels sorry for this hapless creature, and attempts to find out where it belongs. Eventually they find a kind of utopian haven, inhabited by other such bizarre creatures, and the boy and the lost thing part company.

Shaun Tan emphasises that he writes picture books not children’s books. His books, like many picture books, deal with complex themes.

The Resolution

What do you think of the final image? Why does the story end like this? What does this image add to the story? Explain.

What happens to a place when people stop noticing things?

Write three examples of evidence from the text that supports the claim the book has a happy ending.

Write three examples of evidence from the text that supports the claim the book has a sad ending.

Discuss responses as a class.

Characters

Write a short description of these characters:

Shaun
The Lost Thing
Pete

Shaun

The central human character in The Lost Thing is not named in the story itself, but the postcard-style blurb on the back cover identifies the narrator as Shaun. Shaun is ordinary and conventional and his characterisation befits the uniformity and conformity of the society in which he lives.

The Lost Thing

This character is illustrated in a way to produce puzzlement and curiosity. It is an odd combination of mechanical and organic parts, something it shares with other “things” in the book. Tan has written that he got the idea for The Lost Thing after making a sketch of a crab while at the beach. While the lost thing doesn’t speak in this story, the impression is created that – despite its size – it is gentle and vulnerable.

Pete

Shaun’s artistic friend, Pete, serves as a contrast to the conformity of other characters and human figures in the book. The swirly, colourful lines depicted in his artwork suggest he sees the world differently and is willing to look at it from different perspectives; a point emphasised by him sitting on the roof of a house and looking over the neighbourhood and Shaun noting he has an opinion about everything. His dialogue also reveals he is willing to suggest alternative ways of seeing issues and is comfortable with uncertainty: “Maybe it doesn’t belong to anyone. Maybe it doesn’t come from anywhere.”

TASK

Find evidence within the images or written text that supports the reading that the lost thing is gentle and vulnerable.

What other adjectives apply to the character of The Lost Thing?

Setting

When thinking about the setting of a narrative it is useful to remember that setting is both physical as well as social. There are many “clues” in the images of The Lost Thingthat indicate the kind of society in which the story is set: what it values and doesn’t value.

When creating The Lost Thing book, Shaun Tan was inspired by his father’s old scientific and engineering text books. He created a background out of these books to suggest a world without imagination.

Tan likes to think that The Lost Thing was the first piece of fiction ever set in a society that focused only on facts with no interest in personal stories.

Discussion

Find the page that begins, “This all happened a few summers ago…”

What does the image reveal about the physical world represented?
What is revealed about the society in which the action takes place - what might people find important or unimportant in this society? What is missing from this world (according to this image)?
What evidence is there that the setting is a dystopia?

PEEL paragraph

Using this image (as well as others in the book) as evidence - complete this PEEL paragraph.

The setting of The Lost Thing indicates the kind of society in which the story is set values: precision; growth; conformity; rules and order; and doesn’t value the natural world, art, freedom or individuality.

Symbolism

Complete this worksheet on symbolism in The Lost Thing. You will need to have a copy of the picture book with you.

Symbolism in The Lost Thing

Visual Techniques

Analyse two images from the picture book. The Lost Thing for visual techniques by completing two TQE tables. You can choose any two images.

Make a copy of the table from the document below to complete this task. For the name of the text being analysed - quote the first line of text on the page, or describe the pages position in the story.

TQE table

Theme

Theme: refers to ideas or issues that are beneath the surface of the story.

Themes relate to concerns, beliefs, or feelings about life in general.

Modern life in cities

Conformity

Friendship and loneliness

Belonging

There are four thematic topics that arise from the story of The Lost Thing. These are:

Modern life in cities
Conformity
Friendship and loneliness
Belonging

What thematic statements does the text make about each topic?

What visual and language techniques have been used most successfully to develop this theme?

Film Adaptation

In 2011, Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann received an Oscar at the Academy Awards in the United States for the best animated short film ‘The Lost Thing’ (Ruhemann & Tan, 2010), from the original picture book by Shaun Tan (2000).

The book and movie versions are, of course, the same story, with the content being almost identical and with only modest changes in the verbal narration. Both versions use essentially the same minimalist style of drawing characters — minimalist in the sense of not being realistic or naturalistic, but using simple dots and circles for eyes and not being concerned to have correctly proportioned head size or body parts — and the characters look very much the same in the book and the movie. What is strikingly different is the deployment of the interpersonal aspects of the images that construct the interactive relationship between the represented participants and the viewer. This is particularly so with the social distance and the nature of the contact achieved by the gaze of the characters directly at the viewer (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), as well as difference in point of view (Painter, 2007; Painter, Martin et al. in press; Unsworth, in press).

Trailer

When adapted to film, the story of The Lost Thing continues to explore a world where people have lost the ability to really see what is around them or to recognise and value something special and extraordinary.

The film draws on the melancholy sense of loss accompanying the boy’s memories of the lost thing. He was the only one in his bleak and soulless world to notice the strange lost creature, and the only one who cared enough to find a place for it to belong.

However, after glimpsing the magical world of lost things, the boy is left on the other side of a closed door looking towards a future where he will become like everybody else: someone who ‘stops noticing’.

TASK

Which did you prefer - the film or the picture book?

Is the tone of the film different from the tone of the book?

Do you agree or disagree with this claim - explain your reason:

In the book, the reader remains quite separate from the lost thing and the boy, whom we generally see in the distance. In the film, we are drawn into the world and connected more closely with the boy and his experience.

Exploring character: the boy

In the picture book, the boy character is generally viewed at a distance.

However, the animation form requires a more intimate connection to character, with a range of different shots that bring the viewer closer to the character.

In responding to this different storytelling form, Tan had to provide more visual information about this character.

For instance, he designed a range of facial expressions, gestures and stances for the digital effects and animation team to use when creating the character.

Look at the following images. One has been taken directly from the book and the other is a character drawing made as part of the pre-production process.

1. Describe the differences in the portrayal of the boy.

2. How do these differences affect your understanding of the character of the boy?

3. How do these differences change your response to the character?

4. In describing the process of creating characters for the screen, Shaun Tan suggests that the relationship created between the viewers and the characters in the story has an intimacy that is not part of the experience of reading the book.

5. What do you think he means? Explain using examples from the book and the film.

Adapting for the screen

When adapting The Lost Thing for the screen, the creative team (including Shaun Tan) could not rely too heavily on the pre-existing work. This is how Shaun Tan described the process:

In producing any adaptation, you have to start from scratch. You’re not just taking one image and thinking ‘Okay, let’s try and turn this into a scene, what do we have to build? What do we have to move?’ That was very rare actually if you look from book to film that there are scenes that are directly translated.

TASK: the adaptation process

1. What are some of the things that need to be taken into account when adapting a picture book into a film?

2. Choose a scene from the film to explain some of the challenges and changes that are required in the adaptation process.

Imagine a world without imagination...

The lost thing is a playful, purposeless creature who finds itself in a fact-driven universe where there is no art, music or literature.

Use your imagination to create your own version of a world without imagination using the creative form that best suits your ideas.

How important are imagination and creativity to a society and to the people living in a particular place?

Think about the place where you live. Describe some of the ways people express, experience or share imagination and creativity in your community.

Are there qualities or aspects it shares with the world of The Lost Thing?

LEARNING PORTFOLIO TASK 5

Students write a discursive response to the film version of The Lost Thing, exploring the way the film influenced their own thoughts, feelings and attitudes.

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