Photo: Inari Kiuru

Update: Shaun also sent us his Bookprint – the five books that most influenced him – for YouAreWhatYouRead.com! We encourage you to check it out, join the site, create your own Bookprint and Bookmate Shaun!

Award-winning Australian author and illustrator Shaun Tan is a favorite around here. His books The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia are beautiful, and the recently-released collection Lost & Found: Three by Shaun Tan is a fantastic anthology of The Lost Thing, The Red Tree, and The Rabbits, three stories originally published in Australia as individual books, never before widely available in the U.S., and now collected by Arthur A. Levine books. He is the 2011 recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, one of the world’s most prestigious awards for children’s literature, and he has twice won the World Fantasy Award.

In February, Shaun’s award shelf grew to include an Oscar. The Lost Thing was turned into an animated movie, which was then recognized as the Best Short Film (Animated) at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony. Being such fans of his work, we jumped at the chance to talk to Shaun about his film and how he turned a picture book into an Oscar-winning movie.

OOM spoke with Shaun over email about his five-year journey taking The Lost Thing from book to film and what his Oscar experience was like. Here’s an edited version of the interview. Enjoy!

You worked as a concept artist on WALL-E. How did that experience help you translate The Lost Thing into an animated film?

It added to my understanding of how artwork is translated into the medium of film, something I had been studying informally for a while. In particular, that most of the creative brainstorming happens right at the beginning, and is subsequently refined towards more ‘practical’ ideas. In the case of WALL-E, I was asked to freely interpret various scenarios to do with space-ships, robots, and abandoned planets, even prior to a final script. Pixar works on the principal that original visual concepts can lead to new and interesting narrative directions, and encouraged me to be as imaginative as possible – to ‘go wild’. I guess it confirmed my own approach to storytelling, where I tend to follow a similar pattern: crazy beginnings, followed by a more analytical, studied evolution. That’s certainly true of The Lost Thing, where initial storyboarding and design work extended the book in some wacky directions, before returning to more ‘sensible’ story structures.

After watching the short, going back to the book feels like looking at a series of exquisite storyboards. Did you always intend to turn The Lost Thing into a film, or did it just come as a natural extension of what already existed?

Well, I honestly had no idea that the story would ever be adapted as a film while I was writing and illustrating it, back in 1998. But I do remember wanting the paintings in the book to look quite cinematic, or something like a family slide show (where nostalgia is the theme of the narrative ‘voice over’). I was very conscious of things like lighting, framing, and character continuity, much more so than I had been with previous works, and increasingly thought of backgrounds as ‘sets’. And this is likely a key reason why the book was first noticed by Andrew Ruhemann (a London-based producer) in the first place, as something that might adapt well to animation. Certainly I was open to the suggestion, also — you could say that the book had an implicit desire or pretension towards being a film — so yes, the adaptation became a natural extension of what already existed.

Illustration(s) from Lost & Found: Three by Shaun Tan copyright 2011 by Shaun Tan. Used with permission from Scholastic Inc. / Arthur A. Levine Books.

I found the narrative differences between the book and the film really interesting—you expanded the scene with the narrator’s friend Pete, there’s a key instead of a button at the place where the Lost Thing ends up, the narration at the end of the book about how the story isn’t so profound isn’t in the film. How did you and your co-director, Andrew Ruhemann decide what to expand, what to change, and, most importantly, what to leave out?

Actually there’s a lot more development and departure from the original story that we experimented with, and that is not included in the final film (where we essentially returned to a quite faithful interpretation of the book). At one point I storyboarded a 24-minute version – almost twice the current length – in which the Lost Thing is actually abandoned to a government department, and the boy has to decide to rescue it, making him a more active than passive character, more conscious that there’s something wrong in his universe. In the end, though, it was the simple fable-like structure that made the most sense, so many months of work remains unseen (ultimately a good thing!). We returned to a very simple story.

With regard to other details, every artistic choice had largely to do with the problems of moving from the static medium of the book, to dynamic film, and a need to sustain audience interest in a different way. With the character Pete, for instance, it works nicely in the book that you only glimpse him and, when reading, have a moment to pause and consider what kind of a person he might be. In film, there is no such time to reflect, so you need to provide more clues, further suggestions of his lifestyle and interests. Another example involves an advertisement: in the book, it’s a newspaper ad, while in the film, it naturally needs to be on television (which then limits the location of its viewing, and how you transition between shots). It’s surprising the number of problems that arise from what at first would seem to be a very straightforward adaptation. In each case, we were aiming for the simplest solution – and the most affordable, because every second of an animated film is quite slow and expensive to create.

On your website, you say the text of The Lost Thing “is written as a matter-of-fact anecdote,” but in the film the tone feels far more melancholy, from the music to the emphasis on the dystopian nature of the story’s world (I’m thinking, specifically, about how in the last moments of the film the idea of “lost things” gets kind of flipped on its head). Was this tonal shift deliberate, or is it just a by-product of the different mediums?

Both really, I think it’s a by-product of the different media, as well as a conscious choice. The book seems a little more amusing and lively in its written narrative, and that’s partly to inject energy and humour into static, painted images. When things are animated, a lot of that energy already exists, and so the more melancholy, even ‘flat’ narrative voice offers an interesting counterbalance. There is also this issue I mentioned, of a film offering less time for the reader to reflect, or pause to ask questions: the dystopian world is more implicit in the book, yet needs to be a little more explicit in the film. The contrasting nature of the ‘land of lost things’ at the end is similarly about elaborating the concept of ‘duality’ that runs through the story, ie. the split between dystopian and utopian worlds. I also feel that working on the film actually presented an opportunity to allow the story to evolve a little more, so that the feeling of melancholy and adult nostalgia comes through as a more central theme. For example, I decided that the narrator at the end should be dressed in a suit, as if much older, and reflecting on an experience in his youth – so he is a little older here than he is in the original book.

What was the Oscar experience like, from the moment you heard you were nominated to the time you walked off the stage with a statue in your hands?

A question I’ve been asked a lot! As I said on stage, the moment the statue was passed to me (weighing more than eight pounds) it was “surreal.” Being nominated a month earlier was actually the most exciting part, that sense of having made the cut, and that, win or lose, our film had received the highest form of recognition. The lead-up to the actual announcement was a little stressful to be honest – a lot to organize and many logistical problems – but also fun. What I enjoyed the most was meeting the other animated film nominees as we toured a few studios in the preceding week; it made the whole event feel like a friendly celebration rather than a competitive thing (and I was able to use my gold statue later to get other nominees in the after parties, so a nice sense of solidarity there). The moment of receiving the award was genuinely strange, like being displaced into another reality, almost more puzzling than exciting as we were led backstage to be blasted by camera flashes, and mingle briefly with high-profile stars (award hosts and those who had also just won awards). The whole experience had some parallels with a visit to Willy Wonka’s Factory translated into a brief glimpse of some inner sanctum of Hollywood, after which we were safely deposited back home to ordinary suburban Melbourne, only with this strange souvenir on the mantelpiece. So even now it still feels quite surreal – living in a parallel reality in which we actually won an Oscar.

The short film The Lost Thing is available for download on iTunes.