The Arrival (graphic novel)

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a wordless "graphic novel" published by Hodder's Children's books in 2006. The book is 128 pages long and divided into six chapters; it is composed of small, medium, and large panels, and often features pages of full artwork. It features an immigrant’s life in an imaginary world that sometimes vaguely resembles our own. Without the use of dialogue or text, Tan portrays the experience of a father immigrating to a new land.^[1] Tan differentiates The Arrival from children's picture books, explaining that there's more emphasis on continuity in texts with multiple frames and panels, and that a "graphic novel" text like his more closely resembles a film making process.^[2] Shaun Tan has said he wanted his book to build a kind of empathy in readers: "In Australia, people don’t stop to imagine what it’s like for some of these refugees. They just see them as a problem once they’re here, without thinking about the bigger picture. I don’t expect the book to change anybody’s opinion about things, but if it at least makes them pause to think, I’ll feel as if I’ve succeeded in something."^[3]

Synopsis

The Arrival tells a universal story of immigration. The protagonist, a young man, leaves his troubled homeland in search of a new home for his wife and daughter. His homeland is haunted by shadowy, spiky tails that weave in and out of the city, giving the sense that he is trying to help his family escape a malevolent force. In subsequent parts of the book, the man encounters cultural and language barriers characterized by strange creatures and unrecognizable objects, making it a struggle for him to find work and room and board. The man also encounters friendly strangers who share their accounts of immigrating from troubled homelands. The "graphic novel" conveys messages of solitude, alienation, and hope in a foreign land.^[4]

Style

Tan sets the mood of each scene with sepia-tone color schemes, ranging from grayscale to bright gold. The illustrations are reminiscent of aged photos, and often feature realistic looking humans in abstract and bizarre environments. The environments resemble a combination of futuristic and old fashioned aesthetics.^[4] Tan's process was one that used real-life models to create a storyboard. He also shot pictures in his garage, using a video camera and empty boxes to create lighting.^[5] Shaun Tan has commented on the reason for this process: “I was very dependent on photography for a lot of the drawings, because they’re photo-realistic. It’s not my favorite style of working, and I didn’t feel very confident. The other thing was continuity. When I started, I was drawing everything out of my head by hand, and I was finding that there were accumulating continuity problems--just little things that you notice subconsciously, like the length of a sleeve, how a lapel falls, where the rim of a hat is. The only way to register all of that properly was to photograph a lot of the stuff"^[3] Shaun Tan has commented that he was influenced by The Snowman by Raymond Briggs.^[6]

References