The Arrival
A man leaves his homeland for a new country, where he must build a life and support his family back home. This new land is filled with strange architectural wonders, fantastic animals, and other immigrants, each with their own stories of why they left home. This wordless graphic novel explores themes of displacement, adaptation, and the universal experience of seeking a new beginning.
Shaun Tan used a combination of photography and traditional drawing to achieve the book's realistic yet surreal aesthetic. He staged scenes in his garage using a video camera, empty boxes, and real-life models to create a storyboard before rendering the final pencil illustrations.
While the narrative is not autobiographical, it is deeply rooted in the author's family history and extensive research into the immigrant experience. The visual style was specifically inspired by historical photographs from the Ellis Island archives in New York.
The endpapers feature sixty individual portraits that were inspired by archival photographs of immigrants from the Ellis Island Museum. These images serve to ground the fantastical narrative in the collective, historical reality of people who have migrated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
