Week Two - "The Arrival" and its use of metaphor

Metaphor

“… I often like to think of words and images as opposite points on a battery, creating a potential voltage through a ‘gap’ between telling and showing. It requires the reader’s imagination to complete the circuit …”(1)

Metaphor definition and news clipping for narrative inspiration

The Arrival

"The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope."(2)

Analysis

•  A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town
• The old country is portrayed with a sense of doom and gloom, the image is dark with an unknown, faceless, creeping monster with tendrils seeping around the streets and houses. There appears to be no end to the row upon row of streets of austere tiny windowed homes. It is unsympathetic, hard and grim.
•  an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean
• Tan uses scale expertly in his works, and has done so again in this narrative. In order to demonstrate the almost immeasurable expanse of the sea the man has to traverse, a colossal cloud hovers darkly above the expansive ocean and the ship appears tiny, and we know from our own experience of grand sea travel, that this vessel is in fact itself titanic in size, accentuating even more so the huge distance the protagonist is journeying away from his family.
• He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages
• They say that you can usually tell a tourist because they tend to look up and around and point at things which we take for granted. The first  sequence of images we see is a close-up of the man looking up and around, he looks up, his hand shielding his eyes from the light to see a flock of seabirds, not the usual seagulls one would expect. The view changes to a long shot where characters are also looking up and pointing up at the birds. Then an extreme long shot shows us the harbour, city skyline, again with the crowd on the ship gesturing towards this unfamiliar metropolitan land of hope. Tan has devised characters to form "any" foreign language. 
• With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment
• The protagonist communicates with a notebook and pencil and draws a bed and window to indicate that he seeks somewhere to stay, he continues to use this form of communication.
• He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope

Conclusion

Tan uses weird and wonderful surrealist creatures, symbols, landscapes and cityscapes to communicate with the viewer. He also uses sequences of images in the comic art style.

The Arrival - Confused Man - Shaun Tan 2007

Evaluation

I thought it would be interesting to represent the tidal wave as giant hands embracing the children to show that they are safe even though they have been torn away from their family with such a great natural force. They are then transported to a foreign land where the sun is shining and there is hope. 

References

(1) Tan, Shaun http://www.alma.se/en/award-winners/2011-Recipient/More-about-XXX/
(2) Tan, Shaun http://www.shauntan.net/books/the-arrival.html