The Arrival - Shaun Tan

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The Arrival
Shaun Tan

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a very interesting story, told in a comic. The reason why this works so well, is because although Tan does not use any descriptions or any of the characters speaking to one another. This comic worked particularity well because it was very cinematic as well as animatic. Going scene by scene, and sometimes as detailed as frame by frame. In a sense, it can be seen as a silent film – they usually did not have to have dialogue between the characters, it was all inaudible. The majority of how this story worked out was as the saying goes, ‘actions speak louder than words’. So, whenever you’d go to the next frame it would be in a very sequential way of looking at how the story is being played out. Tan even shows the characters in a very close up scale, showing the emotions on their faces and how they react with each other as well as the environment around them. Even the way that Tan would illustrate the scene as a whole, so we could understand the scale of everything and see the bigger picture helped demonstrate how the immigrants in the story felt. His comic also works because the main character is an immigrant in a strange, futuristic world ­– the reason why it works without the use of words is because the character himself is isolated, so yet again it gives the reader that parallelism. I think that because there is so much emotion in this comic that it can be thought of as the reader being the main character and making the reader speak as we do in our heads.

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