In the internet’s slop era, where even auteurs such as Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki can find their distinctive style cribbed en masse by platforms like ChatGPT, perhaps it was inevitable that Australian artist Shaun Tan would encounter his own AI imitators.
For the moment, at least, Tan can laugh about it.
“The AI doesn’t get it,” Tan chuckles. “It’s a superficial simulation – it’s like they know the symptoms, but they don’t know the disease.”
The award-winning writer and illustrator isn’t totally sold on his own metaphor, but if epidemiologists could trace the source of his particular creative condition, it would probably be somewhere on the outskirts of Perth’s northern suburbs in the 1980s, where Tan grew up.
“I’m like one of those old migrants that talks nostalgically about an old country that doesn’t even exist,” Tan says over the phone from his current home in Melbourne.
“On one hand, [that outer suburbia where I grew up] was potentially boring and a little dreary and quite artistically uninspiring. On the other hand, anything’s possible and nobody cares. You can just create or imagine something – it’s like a blank canvas.”
For a few hours a day, that blank canvas was punctuated by what Tan calls the “artform of the suburbs” – television. Only “three glorious channels” were available, but Tan would tape Doctor Who, Astro Boy and Twilight Zone reruns on the family VCR each night. It was those shows that kickstarted his interest in fantasy, science fiction, and eventually writing and illustrating his own stories.
He poured these memories and feelings into his 2008 book, Tales from Outer Suburbia – 15 illustrated short stories that reimagined those suburbs as a familiar but surreal landscape. These tales were full of memorable, unlikely characters, from a giant water buffalo in a vacant lot to a wandering deep-sea diver – an allusion to Western Australia’s history of migrant Japanese pearl divers who once braved the bends in their hundreds.
“I think my work is often misunderstood,” Tan says of Outer Suburbia’s look and feel. “I’m always at pains to say my style is not ‘quirky’, it’s not ‘weird’. It’s about normal things, normal feelings. They’re just displaced into other objects, but the displacement helps you to think about the deeper feelings and deeper meanings.”
On 1 January, Tales of Outer Suburbia lands on the small screen as a 10-part animated ABC series. While Tan’s work has been adapted for the stage many times – including Opera Australia’s Helpmann award-winning take on the John Marsden-penned colonial allegory The Rabbits – it’s only his second major screen work.
Tan’s first screen foray, 2011’s The Lost Thing, scored him an Academy Award for best short film – but he never considered Tales from Outer Suburbia to be particularly adaptable.
“I live in that sort of strange, little, rarefied, silent world of hand-drawn pictures and very vignette-type stories, quite uncertain stories I would say,” he says.
He has, however, always been fascinated to hear how readers and other creators interpret his personal vision.
“You come to understand that the story becomes a very different thing once it leaves your desk, and a very mutable thing,” Tan says.
“One kid said ‘I love the story about the two sisters’. And I’m like ‘What sisters?’ And then I realised, well, I don’t really give an identity to my protagonist, so they [young readers] just read themselves, and what they knew, into the stories.”
In the series, those episodic vignettes are linked by the story of a family – teenager Klara (Brooklyn Davies), 10-year-old Pim (Felix Oliver Vergés) and mum Lucy (Geraldine Hakewill) – who move to the suburbs after a loss. All three use imagination to make sense of the same blank canvas Tan encountered: Klara draws, Lucy is a frustrated writer and Pim loves to tell stories.
Tan is listed as a creative director for the series but credits its large team of collaborators for putting creation at the heart of the show.
“I like that the series does have that self-reflexive feeling; that it’s a group of humans making imagery about humans making imagery,” he says. “We’re always questioning what it means to be an artist. How does it relate to myself and my real world experience? And what’s it like to be a person alive in the world at this particular place or time?”
Like the Perth suburbs Tan once knew, the show arrives in a media landscape unrecognisable from his childhood. Those three intermittent channels now compete with a continual feed of online content – something Tan has seen first-hand as the father of two young children.
“My kids like to sort of bomb out after school and watch a bit of YouTube, and I’m just like ‘Oh my goodness, this is very different to the stuff that I would view’.
“I’m wary of starting to sound like an old man, waving my fist and talking about coherent narrative,” he laughs. “‘Where’s the arc?!’”
While the material his kids are watching is “alien” to him, their responses to this “confusing media landscape” remind him of his younger self.
“I grew up with the advent of computer games and a lot of bad commercial television. It was a confusing landscape,” he says. “Me and my friends would have to negotiate that, and try and find anchored, human value in all of this nonsense. And I can see my own kids doing the same thing.”
Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia premieres on ABC iview on 1 January.
