Disability and Belonging in Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing

Disability and Diversity

Diversity that includes disability does not always appear overtly in children’s storybooks, and when it does, the disability is often offered as a moral, even accompanied by a “lesson” for young readers. In order to present overt images of disability in books and other narratives for young children, I shall discuss the picture book The Lost Thing, which explores conformism by way of the normal, the habitual, and the conventional. Written and illustrated by award-winning Australian author, artist, and filmmaker Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing was published in 2000 by Lothian Books and made into a fifteen-minute animated short film in 2010 that was directed by Tan and Andrew Ruhemann and that went on to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Tan’s picture book presents a complicated narrative in which an unnamed boy meets a not-quite-human, not-quite-animal, not-exactly-mechanical friend “lost” on the beaches of an industrial port city.

Only the boy, who also narrates the story, seems aware for the most part of the lost thing’s existence. The boy takes the lost thing to his friend Pete, then home, then to a government office, where a janitor directs them away from the government bureaucracy by handing them a paper with a squiggly arrow on it. Finally, following the directive on the paper, the boy and the lost thing discover an idyllic and colourful utopia populated by creatures that in many ways resemble the lost thing. From a disability perspective, the body of the lost thing—not so much lost from where it belongs but lost inside a world that clearly will not let it belong—represents the unrepresentable.

In addition to considering the character of the lost thing as representative of disabled characters, I wish to examine the narrator’s character for subtle depictions of cognitive difference. The boy narrator, who is on the cusp of puberty, devotes his free time to the hobby of searching for and collecting bottle tops. The end pages of the book are filled with neat rows of evenly spaced bottle tops, all but one white with black geometric markings. The book opens with the boy going to the beach to collect discarded bottle tops. As Kerry Mallan notes, “[t]rash is the ideal utopian metaphor inviting both critique of current society and transformative possibilities” (28). In The Lost Thing, such “trash aesthetics,” Mallan argues, present “disorder, decay, degeneration, and a loss of energy,” and yet the boy maintains a form of compassion for the lost thing that functions as “testimony to a lingering humanity in this bleak dystopic space” (32). In this way, the boy figures as intrepid taxonomist, trash collector, and “hero” figure. He interrupts his usual quest for bottle tops to notice what no one else on the beach seems to: namely, a creature unlike the other human or pet beach dwellers.

The boy accidentally discovers the lost thing on a polluted urban beach filled with industrial pipes and rectangular objects. This lost thing does not seem to have a name, “belong” to anyone, or come from any place in the boy’s world. The lost thing towers over the boy, is red with accompanying trap doors and bells, and combines animate and mechanical parts. Tan himself refers to this hybrid character as “a huge tentacled monster, not quite animal or machine, with no particular function or origin. Whimsical, purposeless and estranged from everything around it, it is out of place in a much deeper sense than just being ‘lost’” (“Picture”).¹ The lost thing is unknown, not yet classified, and ultimately indeterminate. The boy befriends the lost thing, concerned with both its lack of place in this world and his own pursuit of a non-verbal yet social pleasure.

Because the lost thing does not speak, its presence is primarily visual. As the boy searches for where the lost thing might belong, the bleak and gloomy cityscapes in the backgrounds of the illustrations hint that this vivid and fabulous being definitely does not belong anywhere, except perhaps in the...