My dissertation; an analysis of the picture book 'The rabbits'

I got a really good grade for my dissertation (!!!!!) so I'm superhappy and can finally just enjoy my work, so here I can share a snapshot from it and some of the images from the book...

An image has the power and ability to affect someone; it can tell a story and in the same time educate its readers about deeper subjects. The picture book The Rabbits, educates about issues like colonisation and environmental issues and is a book that can be read by both children and adults. In addition, they are vital to our culture, and a valuable contribution to social, and literary history. It is important to learn about and remember history, and this story is told in such a different and unusual way because it is done from the viewpoint of the colonise

d. The story of The Rabbits is ideal to telling this particular fable first of all by; using a relevant illustration style, and more significantly; having the rabbits as a metaphor for the Europeans. In my dissertation, a world of visually loaded images were explored and analysed, narrating a fascinating story of how rabbits went to Australia and colonised the country. Freelance artist and author Shaun Tan has created the illustrations in this book and is best known for

illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects. He has adapted his illustrations to go with the story and text, which is written by John Marsden. He uses few and carefully selected words and phrases to portray this story, which together with the illustrations create a dazzlingly harmonized tale with deeper meani

ngs. With theorist Frantz Fanon’s ideas, I argued that colonisation correlates with violence and by doing that uses it to control and destroy indigenous people’s social forms. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, reasons that a powerful tool to control people is by surveillance and therefore I reason that by invading and colonizing people and places, they also spread their cities along with their ideologies and be

liefs. As a consequence, a disciplinary system through surveillance has spread and is currently in contemporary society progressing into citizens everyday life. The powerful images portray the way in which the story in the beginning seem to be a quite happy,

but then turn out to be a much darker. To understand how it’s revealing these complex themes, I used semiotics, the study of signs to investigate the illustrations. Roland Barthes explains that only by separating and analysing the signs in an image one by one is it possible to understand its deeper meanings. Only once the signs have been broken down is it possible to understand its deeper meanings. These images contain signs that have most likely been put there intentionally so that its signifiers are transmitted as clearly as possible. The signs are there to powerfully and directly convey this books messages and ideas. Thus to completely understand the illustrations in The Rabbits, I started by addressing the subject of the ‘Other’.

This is a relevant as the book teaches its reader of how the indigenous people might have experienced colonisation. In this section the sense of nationalism is relevant as it is a result of first establishing other people’s differences. As soon as this happens, the idea of the ‘Other’ often becomes violent and destructive. I argued this as I examined the differences between the rabbits and the numbats in the illustrations. In the second section, the environment was at focus and the effects that colonisation can have on it. After all, the environment is important to us all, as it is our responsibility to keep a healthy ecosystem. So, the illustrations in this book portray the environment and how it reacts to invasive species, such as the rabbits, which can

be very destructive when they enter a new landscape. The atmosphere of the illustrations change throughout the book and what is amazing is how the rabbits are used as a metaphor to represent the Europeans, as they have both been successful colonizers, at least if measured in how dominant they have soon after become in the colonized area. Finally, in the last section I studied the surrealistic and dream-like illustratio

ns and the way Tan has designed them to communicate how colonisation can, through control and surveillance become violent and destructive.