Adaptation: Writing as Rewriting and The Lost Thing

Abstract

From the moment I saw writer, artist and filmmaker Shaun Tan’s evocative and moving animated short The Lost Thing (2010), I wanted to know more. It is a film that is tonally assured. You might even say pitch perfect. How did Tan create The Lost Thing’s distinctive and meticulously thought-through story world, transposing it from an award-winning children’s picture book (with more than its share of adult admirers) to an Academy Award-winning short animation?¹ How do you adapt what filmmaker Raúl Ruiz called ‘an atmosphere of story’?² In the past, notions of what may have been lost along the way dominated much discussion of adaptation from books to screen. Yet, as Salman Rushdie wrote in his own allegorical children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, ‘No story comes from nowhere, New stories are born from old — It is the new combinations that make then new.’³ Shaun Tan’s process in writing and rewriting The Lost Thing across multiple media provides an illuminating example of the role of improvisation in adaptation. But, firstly, let’s consider the some of the backstory and state of play on adaptation.