The Arrival

Its clear that Shaun Tan put a lot of thought into The Arrival's universe. The creatures, technology and environment are all incredible, and Tan takes a lot of time exploring both the environment, and his characters. If the world and the characters were not this strong there is no way I would have sat through this story. Its a strong choice to tell the main characters story, which is immigrating, then waiting for his family to be reunited in the new land for 3 of the 4 chapters. Allowing the main character to explore the world while he waits allows us to understand both the foreign environment, where other characters in the new environment come into play, and the time spent waiting, (because even though there are no words, it is an agonizing wait.)

I would rather have explored and learned more about the world Tan created through actions and conflict, rather than following a character waiting, wandering, getting set up in his new apartment.

The style of drawing and page layouts, with the waiting of the story makes it more exhausting. I like that the drawings are like photos from the 1800's, but would again, like them with a less waiting story.

(Sorry this scan is horrible.) This page illustrates a few different interesting deliberate choices.
The first being the use of blurry images (not so much on this page, the blurs are more accented later on, chapter II I believe, as the main character wakes up to his cat like guppy creature telling him something) to indicate the state of characters weakness.
Another is the use of angles, when looking at the dad in the final panel the girl is looking up at him in a low angle shot. This choice is very dramatic and not totally maintained through the rest of the page. Maybe it is only used this once, at the end of the page, as a punch line?
It is also interesting that the POV is not the main character. The whole piece feels like memories (everything drawn like a photo album) maybe the character we are following is not the main, and the little girl is. I don't know.
This page doesn't capture it as well as the first page, where there is a series where the father is packing up his suit case, but another trait of this piece is how slow it does. Which on the one hand captures the moments extremely well, and makes us aware of how slow waiting is. On the other hand, its a little painful.

I just got out of a storyboarding class where I showed my professor my boards and he brought up an interesting point about the movement in a page. I hadn't ever thought about composition in his terms, but he brought up that the moment from one page, through shapes and lines, will help lead our eyes from one panel to the other, and started showing me how. I marked this page before class today, because it was a little disorienting, or strange that we move from the man walking in one direction to a 180 degree flip where he is moving in the other, towards the back corner of the page (again not a good copy). But after the class maybe it makes sense with the movement of the guppy cat. I don't know, I'm still trying to figure this one out, for some reason this page disorients me/stands out to me.