Acclaimed author and illustrator Shaun Tan has seen his celebrated 2008 anthology, Tales from Outer Suburbia, honoured with a major literary award and transformed into a new animated television series. The book, which inspired the upcoming ABC adaptation, has been named the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year for older readers.
From Page to Screen: A Surreal Suburban Odyssey
On 1 January, Tales from Outer Suburbia makes its debut as a ten-part animated series on ABC iview. This marks only the second major screen adaptation of Tan's work, following his Academy Award-winning short film, The Lost Thing, in 2011. The new series weaves together the book's fifteen illustrated short stories through the narrative of a family—teenager Klara, her younger brother Pim, and their mother Lucy—who use imagination to navigate life after a loss.
Tan serves as creative director on the project and praises the collaborative team for embedding the creative process into the show's heart. Geraldine Hakewill voices mother Lucy, while newcomers Brooklyn Davies and Felix Oliver Vergés voice Klara and Pim, respectively.
Navigating a 'Confusing Media Landscape'
In an era dominated by digital content, Tan reflects on the vast shift from his own childhood, limited to "three glorious channels" of television, to the endless stream his own young children now encounter. He observes his children negotiating today's "confusing media landscape," a process that reminds him of his own youth grappling with early computer games and commercial TV.
This reflection extends to the rise of artificial intelligence. Tan notes encountering AI that attempts to mimic his distinctive artistic style, which he dismisses as a "superficial simulation." For Tan, true creativity stems from deeper, personal wells of experience.
The Personal Roots of a Creative Vision
The source of Tan's unique creative vision is deeply personal, rooted in his upbringing in Perth's northern suburbs during the 1980s. He describes this environment as a "blank canvas"—seemingly mundane yet ripe for imagination. His childhood fascination with taped reruns of Doctor Who, Astro Boy, and The Twilight Zone ignited a lifelong passion for fantasy and science fiction.
Tales from Outer Suburbia is an ode to that childhood, reimagining suburban life through a surreal lens. Its stories feature unexpected inhabitants like a giant water buffalo and a wandering deep-sea diver—the latter a nod to Western Australia's history of Japanese pearl divers. Tan emphasises that his work is often misunderstood as merely "quirky" or "weird." Instead, he aims to explore normal feelings displaced into extraordinary scenarios to reveal deeper meanings.
He finds great value in how readers, especially children, project their own experiences onto his ambiguous characters, making the stories uniquely their own. This mutable quality, he believes, is part of a story's life once it leaves the creator's desk.
As the series prepares to launch, it enters a media world far removed from the one that shaped its creator. Yet, its core themes of imagination, memory, and finding human connection in unfamiliar terrain feel more resonant than ever.
