Showcase: Australian Children’s Television Foundation

Tales from Outer Suburbia, a “digitally handmade” animated series adapted from Academy Award winner Shaun Tan’s illustrated anthology, blends the real and surreal. Cutting-edge CGI animation with a handcrafted stop-motion look and feel has been used to re-create the world established in the book, remaining true to Tan’s original aesthetic.

Tales from Outer Suburbia begins when “almost 13-year-old” Klara and her 6-year-old brother Pim move to Outer Suburbia with their newly single mother, Lucy. The siblings’ summer holiday turns into a series of unexpected and surreal adventures, with the family encountering weird and miraculous phenomena as they adapt to their new reality.

The adaptation is produced by a team of Australian creatives, with Tan as creative director and Sophie Byrne (Highly Spirited) as producer, whose partnership won them an Academy Award for their animated short film The Lost Thing. Tan and Byrne worked in collaboration with executive producer Barbara Stephen and producer Alexia Gates-Foale from Flying Bark Productions and director Noel Cleary.

The complete series of Tales from Outer Suburbia will be available later in 2025, with the Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF) distributing the series.

Ahead of the series’ first screening at the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Tan reflects on the creative process behind the landmark project, which producers say is unlike anything currently on the market.

How did the Tales from Outer Suburbia television adaptation come to be?
Over the years, there have been several proposals to adapt this book as either a feature film or TV series, but it’s quite a difficult transition to make. Due to the writing and illustration process, the stories are quite diverse in both content and style, without any perceivable narrative arc. Sophie [Byrne], my producer, with whom I’ve collaborated for many years, led a discussion initially, and then we began collaborating with Flying Bark and the writers about all the ways that various ideas in the original book might hang together within a more continuous narrative, centering on certain key characters.

Can you tell us a bit about the interplay between the real and the surreal elements of the series?
I think all good fiction is necessarily a mix of fantasy and reality. Even the most straightforward story needs to be a little weird to be interesting. Since the earliest fireside yarns, something unexpected, even inconceivable, must happen within an otherwise normal world—a bear turns into a woman, a prophet rises from the dead, a feathered serpent descends from the sky. Our expectations are disrupted, and suddenly we have a story that lasts for a thousand years or so.

However, too much surrealism leads to an opaque, self-indulgent fantasy that is ultimately boring because it has no traction with our everyday lived experience. It just doesn’t feel real; it doesn’t cross audiences. So, getting the balance right is the key to unlocking our imaginations, comfortably crossing the boundary between believable and unbelievable.

Can you tell us about the process of adapting your illustrations into on-screen animation?
Like any good creative work, the process has been long and convoluted. Lots of trial and error, a very meandering, evolutionary path. Working with this series, I was reminded how creative work is really a huge act of faith and almost reckless confidence, like building a bridge to a shoreline you can’t see. In a fog. With investors. And a schedule! Half the time, our creative team was trying to figure out what the other shore looks like, believing that it must exist. We started out with very vague ideas, and then revised every outline and design until the bridge reached the other side.

This was all highly collaborative. It was fascinating to see how our minds gradually synced as we spent more time in this world, and how the story team brought many of their own childhood and adolescent memories to the script, giving it the emotional texture of reality. In terms of visuals, the style is also very different from my own, while still having some elements of it based on the input of several artists and writers, the product of a big, ongoing conversation that always returned to that fine balance of surrealism with realism.

How has it been watching this project evolve and seeing the Tales from Outer Suburbia world come to life on-screen?
Fascinating, mostly because so much of it is unfamiliar to me, novel in its look and feel. Flying Bark has done a brilliant job bringing all the elements of story and design together into this strange miniature world that feels both weird and relatable. The last part of the animation process has been particularly interesting, seeing everything “click” and line up, scenes and shots that have been discussed and storyboarded for years resolving into beautifully lit and textured moments, sound and music breathing life into everything.

What are you hoping the audience will feel when they watch this series?
Well, it may be an odd thing to say, but I hope audiences will be puzzled… not entirely understanding what, how or why things are happening in the story the way they do. All the best books and TV shows I enjoyed as a young person are those that left me pondering, slightly puzzled, but still enthralled. I get them because I don’t get them.I’ve staked my career on the belief that young audiences are very smart like this; they sense a constellation of deeper meanings beyond simple explanations. They already know the world is a strange and often arbitrary, chaotic thing, and that stuff doesn’t always make clear sense. A golden fish pulled in from the sky, a friend made of junk coming from the earth, a girl hiding in an underpass with the head of a cat—all of these things should feel like familiar discrepancies in the fabric of normal life, like dreams with something important to say, but in a way that can never—should never—be spelled out. I hope they remind audiences of other things, people and situations in their own lives, things that also defy explanation but still feel very truthful.

Read more in ACTF’s Showcase here.