The Red Tree By Shaun Tan Essay

Moving beyond cliché, I sought painted images that might further explore the expressive possibilities of this kind of shared imagination, which could be at once strange and familiar.A nameless young girl appears in every picture, a stand-in for ourselves; she passes helplessly through many dark moments, yet ultimately finds something hopeful at the end of her journey.The extended visual metaphor of the girl sitting in the bottle conveys the idea of her feelings trapped inside.

Moving beyond cliché, I sought painted images that might further explore the expressive possibilities of this kind of shared imagination, which could be at once strange and familiar.A nameless young girl appears in every picture, a stand-in for ourselves; she passes helplessly through many dark moments, yet ultimately finds something hopeful at the end of her journey.The extended visual metaphor of the girl sitting in the bottle conveys the idea of her feelings trapped inside.

It has no sequential narrative, which is something a picture book is ideal for – you can open it at any page, go backwards or forwards, and spend as much time as you wish with each image.

I'd also been increasingly aware that illustration is a powerful way of expressing of feeling as well as ideas, partly because it is outside of verbal language, as many emotions can be hard to articulate in words.

It is common that ‘messages in a bottle’ are lost and never found.

Responders assume that she feels her thoughts and ideas are trapped inside and will not ever be discovered.

Just as all hope seems lost, the girl returns to her bedroom and finds a tiny red seedling growing in the middle of the floor.

It quickly grows into a vivid red tree that fills her room with warm light.

At the beginning she awakes to find blackened leaves falling from her bedroom ceiling, threatening to quietly overwhelm her.

She wanders down a street, overshadowed by a huge fish that floats above her.

began an experimental narrative more than anything else: the idea of a book without a story.

I've always loved Chris Van Allsburg's classic picture book ‘The Mysteries of Harris Burdick’ (1984) which is a great example of word-picture enigmas, exhibiting partial fragments of unknown stories and leaving the reader to use their imagination.