The Lost Thing: a multi-layered children’s story that critiques industrial society

Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan, “The Lost Thing”

Adapted from co-director Shaun Tan’s picture book written for children, the beguiling “The Lost Thing” seems a very simple story yet it is one that invites many interpretations. The film’s visual style adds yet another layer of meaning to a story that would otherwise have a much narrower focus. A boy (unnamed) obsessed with collecting bottle tops at the beach comes across a giant creature, an octopus / lobster / iron furnace hybrid, looking lost and lonely. The boy befriends the stranger and decides to help it look for a home. The boy goes to a friend of his who sets about trying to classify the strange creature by measuring it and noting down its unique characteristics but in the end both boys are defeated and are no closer to determining the creature’s nature and habitat than they were initially. The boy takes the creature home but his parents are disapproving and the creature is shut away in the back shed overnight. In the morning, the boy seeks help from government authorities and is given a business card with an arrowhead sign. The boy must try to locate a place within his home city – a vast and dreary urban landscape – that carries this sign.

Apart from the obvious theme of friendship, connection with isolated others and being helpful, the film also makes references to Australia’s uneasy relationship with immigration and immigrants, the Western need to categorise and stereotype people and objects, and the alienation of individuals within a bureaucratised industrial society. While the story is very simple and does not stand up to treatment longer than 15 minutes, viewers should remember it is told from a child’s point of view and so the film’s emphasis is on creating a visually rich universe where the bizarre and the unexpected co-exist with the familiar and the bleak.

In itself the film’s CGI animation is not anything special: it is the juxtaposition of a bleak post-industrial Melbourne (as suggested by the network of trams), nostalgic beachside scenes and the quirkiness of a giant monster-like creature (which turns out to be friendly and gentle, and needs spoon-feeding) that makes the film stand out visually. The very eccentricity of such a combination along with the fear of immigrants and the government bureaucracy makes the film very … well, very Melburnian.

The film’s conclusion is melancholy and one considers that the boy is more lost than the creature itself, in trying to regain what the oddity represented: an opening to a wider world of rich experiences and new friends. There is a suggestion that (spoiler alert) having done what he set out to do, the boy realises that returning to normality has cost him something precious and the opportunity to step into a new world is forever … lost.