‘My work is often misunderstood’: Shaun Tan on his surreal tales from the outer suburbs | Shawn Tan

IIn the age of the slow internet, where even auteurs like Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki can find their distinct style en masse restricted by platforms like ChatGPT, it’s perhaps inevitable that Australian artist Shaun Tan will encounter his AI imitators.

For now, at least, Tan could laugh about it.

“AI doesn’t understand it,” Tan laughs. “It’s a superficial simulation, as if they know the symptoms, but they don’t know the disease.”

The award-winning writer and illustrator doesn’t quite buy into his own metaphor, but if epidemiologists can trace the source of his particular creative condition, it’s likely to be somewhere on the outskirts of Perth’s northern suburbs in the 1980s, where Tan grew up.

“I’m like one of those old immigrants who talks nostalgically about an old country that doesn’t even exist,” Tan says over the phone from his current home in Melbourne.

“On the one hand, [that outer suburbia where I grew up] It would have been potentially boring, a bit depressing, and artistically uninspiring. On the other hand, anything is possible and no one cares. You can only create or imagine something – it’s like a blank canvas.

For several hours a day, that blank canvas was punctuated by what Tan calls “the art form of suburbia” — television. There were only “three glorious channels” available, but Tan recorded Doctor Who, Astro Boy and Twilight Zone on the family VCR every night. It was these shows that sparked his interest in fantasy and science fiction and eventually writing and illustrating his own stories.

He poured these memories and feelings into his 2008 book, Tales from the Outer Suburbs – 15 illustrated short stories that reimagine those suburbs as familiar but surreal landscapes. These tales were full of unforgettable and unexpected characters, from a giant water buffalo on a vacant lot to a wandering deep-sea diver – a nod to Western Australia’s history of migrant Japanese pearl divers who once braved hundreds of turns.

“I think my work is often misunderstood,” Tan says of the look and feel of Outer Suburbia. “I always try to say that my style is not ‘quirky’, not ‘weird’. It’s about ordinary things, ordinary feelings. They’re displaced into other things, but displacement helps you think about deeper feelings and deeper meanings.”

On January 1, Tales of Outer Suburbia will hit the small screen as a 10-part animated series on ABC. While Tan’s works have been adapted for the stage several times – including the Opera Australia Award-winning Helpmann adaptation of John Marsden’s colonial allegory The Rabbits – It is only his second major work on screen.

Tan’s screen debut, 2011’s The Lost Thing, earned him an Academy Award for Best Short Film — but he never considered Tales from Outer Suburbia particularly adaptable.

“I live in this kind of strange, small, rarefied, silent world of hand-drawn images and very short stories, stories that are never quite certain,” he says.

However, he has always been fascinated to hear how readers and other creatives interpret his personal vision.

“You realize it’s a completely different story once you leave your office, and something is very changeable,” says Tan.

“One of the kids said, ‘I like the story of the two sisters.’ And I said, ‘What sisters?’ Then I realized, well, I’m not giving an identity to the protagonist, so they [young readers] They just read themselves and what they know in the stories.

In the series, these episodic vignettes connect the story of a family – teenager Clara (Brooklyn Davies), 10-year-old Pim (Felix Olivier Verges) and mother Lucy (Geraldine Hakewell) – who move to the suburbs after a loss. The three use imagination to make sense of the same blank canvas Tan faced: Clara paints, Lucy is a frustrated writer, and Pim loves to tell stories.

Tan is listed as the series’ creative director but credits his large team of collaborators for putting creativity at the heart of the show.

“I like that the series has this self-reflexive feeling; it’s about a group of humans making images about humans making images,” he says. “We always wonder what it means to be an artist. How does it relate to myself and my experience in the real world? What is it like to be a living person in the world in this specific place or time?”

As Tan knew in suburban Perth, the show reaches a media landscape unrecognizable from his childhood. These three intermittent channels now compete with a constant feed of online content – ​​something Tan has witnessed firsthand as a father of two young children.

“My kids like to get busy after school and watch a few YouTube videos, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is so different from the stuff I would watch.’

“I worry about sounding like an old man, waving my fist and talking about a coherent narrative,” he laughs. “Where’s the bow?!”

While the material his children watch is “foreign” to him, their reactions to this “confusing media landscape” remind him of himself when he was younger.

“I grew up with the advent of computer games and a lot of bad commercial TV shows. It was a confusing landscape,” he says. “My friends and I have to negotiate this, and try to find a solid human value in all this nonsense. And I can see my kids doing the same.”