A scene from Cicada by Shaun Tan Photograph: Artwork © Shaun Tan/Lothian Children’s Book

Shaun Tan's Cicada: a meditation on belonging and bullying – in pictures

In his latest picture book, acclaimed Australian illustrator, writer and film-maker Shaun Tan explores the ponderous themes of migrant workers and workplace bullying through the voice of a hardworking insect who has toiled away, unappreciated and without promotion, alongside humans in a grey office block for 17 years.

The author of award-winning books including The Rabbits, The Red Tree and The Arrival, as well as Oscar-winning short film The Lost Thing, reveals behind the scenes of the horrifying and humorous story, showing us the sketches and moveable sculptures that ultimately allowed Cicada to fly.

Cicada is the story of a scorned insect who works in a sterile office with hostile coworkers. With shadowy illustrations and sparse narration, it examines workplace bullying in a story that is ‘for anyone who has ever felt unappreciated, overlooked or overworked’.

As a teenager in Perth, Shaun Tan began drawing images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines. He has gone on to create award-winning illustrated books that are at once dystopian and uplifting, surreal and sobering, deftly confronting difficult social, political and historical themes.

‘Belonging’ is a recurring theme in Tan’s work. In Cicada, the protagonist is a data entry clerk who works tirelessly for 17 years alongside humans who never accept him. ‘A lot of my stories are about animals invading human spaces,’ Tan told the Australian. ‘I think it serves as a sort of distorted mirror for ourselves, making us step outside of the narcissistic self-absorption of our species.’

Tan says the character of the cicada reminds him of his own father, Bing, who moved to Australia from Malaysia to study when he was in his early 20s. He was hardworking but had poor English, the author says. ‘[He] was an architect who worked in a few different offices throughout his life. I often got the impression that his skills were underappreciated in some of these places.’

In creating the character of the cicada, Tan says he felt compelled to show ‘the overlooked aspects of ordinary life, almost to try and redress some imbalance in the way that we look at things. To counteract some of those views of the world that might be fairly destructive, even though they may be mainstream and accepted’.

This illustration shows a character sketch of the eponymous cicada. Tan says he wanted to ‘[pay] attention to some people who might be a little more quiet or overlooked. The sort of people around us every day who might be ignored. Sometimes they might be bullied or just otherwise dismissed’.

Tan made models of the characters and scenes, which he subsequently painted. This is an early sculpture of the office-bound protagonist.

The cicada morphs into his insect form in this clay sculpture created by the artist.

A model (left) and painting (right) of the central character living in the ‘office wallspace’. Tan describes the creation process thus: ‘I made a sculpture of the central cicada character with moveable limbs – basically an action figure – and built simple miniature office spaces out of paper and board. I could then arrange and light these elements on a table top, photograph them, and use the resulting images as “sketches” for both structuring the story and as reference for final paintings. In some cases, the finished illustrations are nearly identical to the photographs.’

The storyboarding for Cicada. Tan says the book was initially much longer, but he pared it back to generate ‘mystery’, creating what he says is the ‘simplest’ book he’s ever done.

These illustrations show Tan’s initial sketches for the cover of Cicada. ‘I like to think that each reader comes away [from reading the book] with their own interpretation, that the story and character reminds them of different aspects of themselves and other people they might know,’ he says. ‘I think that’s important with any work of art – whether it’s a story or a painting or play or a film – that you should come away with some questions.’

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON
Shaun Tan's Cicada / A meditation on belonging and bullying – in pictures

DE OTROS MUNDOS
Shaun Tan / Sobre Cigarra
Cigarra, de Shaun Tan / Una meditación en imágenes sobre el sentido de la pertenencia y el acoso
La onírica realidad de Shaun Tan

In conversación / Neil Gaiman talks to Shaun Tan

Illustration by Shaun Tan

In conversation: Neil Gaiman talks to Shaun Tan

'I use text as the grout between the tiles of the pictures. I always overwrite and then trim it down to the bare bones'

• 
  
• The Guardian, Friday 2 December 2011 22.54 GMT

Illustrator, author and Oscar-winning film-maker Shaun Tan (left), with Neil Gaiman. Photograph: Colin McPherson

I met Shaun Tan for the first time in 1996, at a science-fiction convention in Perth, and only half-remember meeting him. He's quiet, shy, generally unassuming. I got to know him slightly better with each subsequent trip to Australia, and he got used to me introducing myself to him and him telling me that actually we'd already met. He's an artist and a writer and now a director, possessor of a peculiar and singular vision. As an artist he combines real drawing skill with a profoundly off-kilter imagination, his characters, human and otherwise, are at the same time funny and enticing; as a writer and storyteller he creates stories, sometimes wordless, always told with an economy of words, which manage to be both alienating and embracing: a child on a beach finds an alien monster inside something (a box? a house? a spaceship?) and brings it home, dealing with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy; an immigrant comes to live in a distant country where everything is different and inexplicable; a foreign exchange student is a tiny, leaf-like botanist; surreal images of depression and hopelessness almost, but do not, overwhelm a small girl, and at the last there is magic and hope.

Tan's vision is intensely personal, but not exclusionary. People love what he does. I've had Australians press his books on me in Australia and bring them as visiting gifts when abroad. His film The Lost Thing won an Oscar as best animated short (fellow Perthling Tim Minchin does the voiceover). He was given the 2010 Astrid Lindgren Memorial award, the only children's award that comes with real money, and the other people on the longlist did not mind. Well, I didn't, anyway, and I was nominated.

He lives in Melbourne. He's not very tall, and he has an easy smile when he relaxes. He does not seem to mind that I only spell his first name right half the time.

He told me once that he began writing after The Rabbits, his award-winning book, started life as a 16-line fax from Australian author John Marsden, which took Shaun a year to illustrate. "And he got half the royalties," he said. But his pictures and his stories are all of a piece.

I had a Shaun Tan painting done on a bottlecap hanging on my wall for a year.

2010 / Books of the year

2010

Books of the year

Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?


Saturday 27 November 2010 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.

John Banville

William James, brother of the – in some quarters – more famous Henry, was that rarest of beings, a philosopher who wrote clear, elegant and exciting prose. In The Heart of William James (Harvard University Press), James's biographer Robert Richardson has put together a dazzling selection of this great thinker's work, with perfectly judged short pieces to usher in each of the selections.

Tony Judt, too, had a wonderful prose style, and his little book The Memory Chalet (William Heinemann), a collection of autobiographical essays, is beautiful and moving. Although Judt, who suffered from motor neurone disease, died earlier this year, this late work is more sustaining than sad.

Death stalks the pages of Seamus Heaney's collection Human Chain (Faber), but as we would expect from this most affirmative and celebratory of poets, the book in the end is really a meditation on life in all its fleeting sweetness.

Julian Barnes

Unfit for life, unsure of love, unschooled in sex, but good at washing up: Philip Larkin, in Letters to Monica (Faber), lays out his all-too-self-aware catalogue of reasons for being uncheerful. The reader is made slightly cheerful by the thought of not having had Larkin's life, but very cheerful that poems of such truth, wit and beauty emerged from it.

If Larkin represents native genius in its costive English form, Stephen Sondheim represents the fecund American version: Finishing the Hat (Virgin Books) is not just a book of lyrics (with cut and variant versions) but an exuberance of memories, principles, anecdotes, criticism and self-criticism.

Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus) unexpectedly combines a micro craft-form with macro history to great effect.

Mary Beard

The most moving book of the year for me was Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land (Allen Lane) – a powerful "living will" written as Judt succumbed to the complete paralysis of motor neurone disease. It is a marvellous denunciation of modern politics ("Something is profoundly wrong with how we live today"), written with all the grace and intensity that only the dying can muster.

On a cheerier note, I have only just caught up with Reaktion's series of books on animals. Robert Irwin's quizzical investigation of the Camel (one hump and two) and Deirdre Jackson's elegant exploration of the frankly rather dull life of the Lion will appeal even to those who would never normally pick up a book on the natural world.

William Boyd

Stephen Sondheim, who has just turned 80, is the unrivalled genius in the world of musical theatre with five or six masterworks that have redefined the form. A superb, generous melodist and a lyricist up there with Cole Porter and Noël Coward, Sondheim has now given us Finishing the Hat. His detailed commentary on his wonderful songs is honest, shrewd and fascinating. The ideal fix for Sondheim addicts.

Poetry addicts, meanwhile, should swiftly acquire Oliver Reynolds's latest collection, Hodge (Areté Books) – poems of beautiful precision that reveal their secrets slowly. And Samko Tále's Cemetery Book (Garnett Press) by the Slovak writer Daniela Kapitánová offers us, in a superb translation by Julia Sherwood, one of the strangest and most compelling voices I have come across in years. Muriel Spark meets Russell Hoban. An astonishing, dark and scabrous novel.

Anthony Browne

I was fascinated by the fattest book I read, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate), an epic novel that tells a funny and moving story of an American family unravelling in the first few years after 9/11. It's about the problems that come with liberty, seen through the lives of what at first seems like the perfect couple.

In contrast, my second choice is a small, exquisite picture book, Eric by Shaun Tan (Templar). This is the tale of a strange foreign exchange student, told from the point of view of the host family. Eric is drawn as a tiny, shadowy figure living in a world of giants. The narrator hints at the "cultural things" that divide them. This is a true picture book in that the illustrations tell as much as the words do, and is that relatively rare thing: a picture book appealing equally to both adults and children.