One of the winners at last night’s Oscars was a short animated film by a guy named Shaun Tan. The film is called The Lost Thing. And it was far and away the best of the nominated shorts. (The Pixar thing was fine. The pollution thing was fine. The Gruffalo was kind of terrible. The Madagascar piece looked nice but was sort of empty.) But, deserved to win, did win. Who knew?

Here I admit a bit of a bias: I really like Shaun Tan. So I was bound to favor his piece over any of the others. And I really like Shaun Tan because I really, really like his bookThe Red Tree. READ MORE >