Week 1 - "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan : How A Story Is Conveyed Without Words

The sequencing of unrelated imagery functions similarly to the Kuleshov effect. The individual panels of imagery don’t connote a meaning unless read in a sequence. It is up to the viewer to understand its implied meaning. How the viewer familiarizes the scenario is based on experience or what the viewer has seen or heard. The beginning of the story demonstrates this function; the hat hanging on the wall, the dinnerware, and the boiling liquid implies that the setting takes place in an inhabited home. The addition of the child’s drawing implies that a family of three lives inside the home. The suitcase suggests that someone has either arrived or is leaving. What the imagery doesn’t express is the importance of this sequence. The reader must piece the scenario together in order to realize that it was to establish the backstory for this man and his family.

The author has established a rule that has been used to convey different meanings. He uses three tones of sepia, which is used to indicate night and day, seasons, and even contrasting moods. There’s a spread where the panels are arranged in a grid-like format, each with a differently shaped cloud. The repeated shades of sepia strengthen the notion that the days are passing. It is assumed that the lighter shades of sepia represent day and the darker ones night. The same logic is applied to the spread of the leaf-like tree; winter is associated with the shade of grey.

The imagery is intentionally abstract in order to make clear and clever correlations. When the tail of the grocery owner’s pet frightened the protagonist, it reminded the man of the monster that loomed amongst his home. By this time, the reader can reasonably conclude that the serpent-like creature is a metaphor for danger, and that the man’s purpose for migrating to another land was to escape the danger that was present back home. The man encounters others who’ve also escaped danger. One escaped a holocaust or terrorism, another from enslavement and another migrated because he lost his home was destroyed during a war.

One thing these people had in common was that they were all immigrants who had found themselves alone, but were willing to share their warmth and togetherness with the man because they knew the struggles of assimilating to a new place.