Lost Thing
July 26, 2015Apparently I’m five years late to the party, but today I
finally discovered the Oscar-winning animated short film adaptation of Shaun
Tan’s ‘The Lost Thing’. And it’s just wonderful.
I have no idea how I was completely oblivious to the film
until this morning, given that I love Shaun Tan’s books, but it was worth the
wait to see it in all its glory on the big screen at the Duke of York’s
Picturehouse in Brighton, which is surely one of the best venues of all time,
not least because you get to watch the movie with a cup of Earl Grey in one
hand and a slice of cake in the other.
The plot revolves around a lost thing, out of place in a
dystopian future, looking for somewhere to belong. If, like me, you enjoy
creatures that are largely made up of tentacles, pincers and cogs, you’re really
in for a treat, but even if steam punk sea creatures aren’t your bag, the
animation is gorgeous, and the story is as delicious as the cake. Oh, and Tim
Minchin narrates, which is really rather charming, even if he was kind of rude
to me on twitter one time.
So, so beautiful, the illustrations for the book are multi-award winning, and it genuinely loses nothing in the transition from page to screen, presumably because Shaun Tan himself was at the helm of
the project, which was more than three years in the making. That’s less than
five minutes of animation a year. And there was me thinking that the week I spent
rotoscoping frames of animation for HitRECord on TV went on far too long.
Showing as part of a collection of shorts from the London
International Animation Festival, the screening kicked off the ‘Stories on
Screen’ season at the Duke of York’s Kids’ Club. You childless folks out there
who get to go to the cinema any night of the week are out of luck this time
though – no unaccompanied adults allowed. But if the rest of the season is
anything like ‘The Lost Thing’ it’s definitely worth borrowing a friend’s
offspring for the morning.
