Although this morning’s Oscar nominations revealed a paucity of comics-themed movies — IRON MAN 2’s SPX nom being the only one for Team Comics Movies — Australian cartoonist Shaun Tan was nominated in the Short Film (Animated) category. There’s a site for the film, THE LOST THING, which Tan directed, here. Tan is an award-winning illustrator and cartoonist whose wordless, haunting THE ARRIVAL is one of the best graphic novels of the past decade.

THE LOST THING deals with a boy who encounters a mysterious red…thing. You can watch the trailer above. There’s also a book, and it all looks gorgeous. Congrats to Tan for really representing Team Comics at the Oscars!

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In other Team Comics/Animation news, TOY STORY 3 was nominated for five awards, because, Pixar, y’know, rules. It’s the second year in a row that a Pixar film was picked for both Best Animated Film and Best Picture.

1 COMMENT

  1. haven’t seen the film, but I recognise Shaun’s own voice in the trailer. ‘Hello’

    Congratulations, Shaun!

  2. From what I’ve heard, Tan doesn’t represent Team Comics so much as he’s been adopted by it; I think he considers himself more of an illustrator than a cartoonist or a graphic novelist. I suppose it doesn’t matter one way or another, though, since he is brilliant.

  3. I read the book years ago, and loved it for its depiction of the loss of childhood wonder.

    It’s been sadly out of print (and expensive) for quite some time, and I hope this film, which looks gorgeous, helps get it back into print.

  4. Great news, Torsten! (missed it)
    Great book!

    An aside: I was sitting down with an exec from Scholastic a couple years ago, and we were discussing The Arrival, which I think is a masterpiece of sequential art (up there with the best of the best for a number of different reasons we can chat about at a later time).

    He’d never heard of The Lost Thing, which is kind of amazing, since Scholastic published The Arrival in the U.S., so I told him the story, kind of like a pitch, and he felt he really needed to get and read it.

    The Lost Thing is also sequential art, though some might argue that’s it’s closer to an illustrated picture book…but the narration is in captions that adjoin sometimes-multiple images on a page, and that (in my mind) makes it sequential art.

    It’s a terrific read.

    –Lee