Week 15: Revision

Shaun Tan's The Arrival

Shaun Tan's The Arrival shows us, without words, our reality of immigration through a fictional world. The graphic novel tells the story of a magical but dangerous world and a man’s journey to an unknown land in order to seek a better life for him and his family. The Arrival tells a universal story of immigration. The story is about a man leaving his home to find work and support his family. The graphic novel conveys messages of solitude, alienation, and hope in a foreign land. The protagonist finds himself in a mysterious new world of foreign customs, peculiar animals and indecipherable languages where he must push through any social, lingual or cultural barriers to forge a new life for him and his family. The environments resemble a combination of futuristic and old-fashioned aesthetics. Through the power of only using pictures it easily conveys the amount of passing time across, as well as conversations between characters and even flashbacks and memories from other characters in the story. The art is monochrome; so it has also removed the medium of color to in any way help get the story across. Through tones of golds, browns, and blacks, Tan portrays this magical world, the emotion, and the progression through soft shading and beautiful imagery. He sets the mood of each scene with sepia-tone color schemes, ranging from grayscale to bright gold. The illustrations are reminiscent of aged photos, and often feature realistic-looking humans in abstract and bizarre environments. The underlying themes of belonging, acceptance and personal identity are brilliantly illustrated throughout the book, the textless sepia images often giving away much more than words ever could. This also allows the reader greater freedom of imagination to interpret the images, the absence of words creating a more conceptual approach to the originally shown story.