perth, Australia, January 11, 2024 – Oscar-winning filmmaker Shaun Tan’s childhood boredom fueled a remarkably imaginative career, now blossoming anew with the animated series adaptation of his 2008 book, Tales from Outer Suburbia, available on ABC iview.
From Empty Streets to Extraordinary Stories: How a Quiet childhood Inspired a unique Vision
Shaun Tan transforms the mundane into the magical, exploring themes of belonging and the strangeness of everyday life through surreal storytelling.
- Tan’s work is deeply rooted in his upbringing in the suburbs of Perth, Australia.
- the new animated series brings his whimsical stories to life, focusing on a family adjusting to suburban life.
- Tan deliberately avoids labeling his work as “fantasy,” preferring the term “surrealism” to capture the inherent strangeness of reality.
- He credits fellow Australian author Tim Winton with inspiring him to write about his own hometown.
Growing up in suburban Perth in the early 1980s, Tan often found himself restless. Hillarys, the waterfront suburb where he spent his childhood, was then “a bit of a nowhere sort of place,” he recalls. His parents, new to the area, built a home with little connection to an established community. “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,” Tan explains.
Long days where spent exploring the local park and cycling with neighborhood kids, fostering a fertile ground for his creativity.”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.He remembers one instance vividly: “I do remember once there was some kind of strange wind and I went down to the park. And tons of newspapers had somehow been caught up in the wind and it was just blowing across the landscape.” This very moment found its way into Tales from Outer Suburbia and is poetically recreated in the new series.
Tan channeled this childhood wonder into a prolific career, writing and illustrating 14 books, and even winning an Oscar for the short film adaptation of his work, The Lost Thing.Now, Tales from Outer Suburbia has been reimagined as an animated series for ABC iview. The book, and now the series, draws directly from the musings and oddities of his youth.
Surrealism, Not Fantasy: Finding the Strange in the Ordinary
Tales from Outer Suburbia presents a world where deep sea divers stroll to the corner store, tiny visitors inhabit crockery cupboards, and goldfish shimmer across the night sky. While fantastical, the stories remain firmly grounded in the reality of suburban life. “I’m always wary of fantasy, because it can sort of spin off into something that feels detached and dreamlike,” Tan says. He gravitates towards surrealism, finding joy in “imagining weird things.”
